Gunslinger Girl: Long Weekend
by RJ Frazer
Summary: An emergency of unprecedented scale seizes the Agency when a cyborg goes missing. All leave is cancelled as the entire Agency descends on Milan- a city of fashion & art, and gutters & back-alleys too - to hunt for their errant ward, before Padania does...
1. Chapter 1 Friday Morning

**GUNSLINGER GIRL**

"_Long Weekend"_

_By_

_Robert Frazer_

_With reference to characters created by "Wraith11", "Kiskaloo", and "Professor Voodoo"_

* * *

"_Fish and visitors smell in three days"_

Benjamin Franklin

* * *

"Painter's gone black."

"…Casualties?" Lorenzo sighed.

"Seven tangos confirmed killed, but objective target is still live. Handler dead. Cyborg-" the word tripped over the speaker's teeth and stumbled out, "-missing."

"I'll come to the compound immediately." Lorenzo acknowledged. "Rouse all handlers onsite. Recall all field personnel currently offsite. Contact the Section One night officer, have him wake Chief Draghi and tell—_request_ that he do the same on his side."

"Sir." The earpiece clicked to a dead rattling burr.

Chief Lorenzo put the 'phone receiver back down on its rest. The heavy weight clunked noisily; the chunky plastic of the device looked inelegant, if not plain anachronistic - some Seventies throwback where the magnets would make your hair stand on end. Of course, it was for a practical purpose – the 'phone was bulky because it was stuffed with snooper-baffling electronics – but the whole stolid inarticulateness of the thick lunk of a contraption suddenly curdled a pit of loathing inside of Lorenzo's stomach.

There were two 'phones beside Lorenzo's bed, a personal line and the Agency connection. His personal line rang with a soft, low-frequency pulse, more a breath than a sound, which rolled over and gently stroked you with a light downy wave. It was almost a request to alertness, one phrased so politely it would be churlish to refuse. By contrast, the Agency 'phone never so much rang as _went off_ – a shrill, shrieking grate of shearing and scraping metal which rattled the fillings in your teeth and juddered window panes from their frames. It was a juvenile tantrum, hammering and beating and screaming at your senses – but you still had to respond to it, because you couldn't let the idiotic tyke brain itself on the furniture as it thrashed about, could you? There seemed something indecent about how a crude, inconsiderate method could still produce the same result.

The mattress springs creaked as Lorenzo swung out of bed, as did the wardrobe door as he began to get dressed. The news that he had just received certainly would not have put anyone in a genial frame of mind, and now even the rustle of his clothes as he pulled them on irked him. Noise - there was never any escape from the noise. Wherever you went, whatever you did, there was always _noise_. The blaring of televisions from a hundred windows, smacking you into a wall of sound; the yowling of drills as yet another building was being clawed out and thrown up; the bronchitic hacking of car exhausts; the relentless drumming of rain; the reedy scratching of pencils and pens; the hum of lights, always whining along the very rim of the periphery.

Years back, before present difficulties made the prospect of northern holidays improbable, Lorenzo had been hiking up in the Dolomites. Even on a bare peak, though, there was always the cutting keen of the wind, or the clink and skitter of weathered stones crumbling away and tumbling down the slopes. You could pinch your nostrils, close your mouth, blindfold your eyes – but stop up your ears and you would only be assaulted by the gurgle and splutter of your own treacherous body. The world drowned in sound. It was constant, incessant, inescapable. Never a breath of relief – not even a mote of respite.

As he scooped up his car keys from the bedside, Lorenzo glanced at the clock.

3 A.M., on the dot.

You had to laugh.

* * *

"Need a coffee." Avise pleaded through the ceiling. He'd been stirred by a small surge of pride when he saw that he was the first to arrive at the lecture theatre – it would soon be a full year since he had left the army, but his promptness was a reassuring sign that the old skills hadn't yet withered. He'd had his leisure to repent, though, picking out sleep gumming up his eyes and rubbing the sandpaper stubble on his chin irritably as others dribbled in.

The lecture theatre was the deep, semi-circular chamber where the cyborgs normally took their school lessons; it reminded Avise of old pictures of medical schools where eager students craned their necks to watch a doctor hack up another reeking cadaver – one probably shoved in through the back by some shady resurrection-man (a cheery allusion, that). All of the seats had been filled, with a few latecomers slouching up against the far walls or leaning over backrests. However, because everyone had streamed in gradually, there was no organisation – handlers and support agents were spread across the theatre very much randomly, but even so conversation seemed free and not stilted. Seeing dialogue between the different branches of Section Two brought to mind lions laying down with lambs, but Avise wondered if the allusion was a little overcooked.

"Honeyed tea. Looks like you could do with a pick-me-up, Manky." Priscilla leaned over to proffer a Thermos-cap of steaming fluid to Avise, smiling as she did so. Avise smiled back – maybe it wasn't so impossible a link after all.

Avise thanked Priscilla and took a sip, rolling the warm slug of fluid along his tongue and appreciating the flavour. "I thought that one of the privileges of being a spook instead of a squaddie was that I wouldn't have to get up early anymore." He offered by way of conversation.

"I wouldn't put you up for an Armani advert right now, I have to say." Priscilla chortled. "You'd be the star of the show for FATIP razors, though!" She darted a nimble hand out and scraped it along Avise's rough cheek.

Avise was startled by the contact and visibly jumped in his seat, almost spilling his drink. A mischievous glint sparkled in Priscilla's eyes – the minx was pleased at provoking a reaction.

Avise tried to regain his composure with a rejoinder. "Alas, my dear, the hour's not too flattering to yourself, either." Which, in all fairness, was true – with a bleary lack of make-up and clothed in a faded grey jumper which read "UNIVERSITY OF URBINO '82-'83" (it had belonged to her father, she insisted), Priscilla was lagging a few steps behind her usual elegantly _coiffured_ self.

Priscilla's bright, elevated gaze suddenly flattened and dulled. "Are you finished?" She muttered sourly, nodding at the cap still in Avise's hand.

Seeing the gates close down in front of Priscilla's lidded expression, Avise shrugged and passed the drink back over to her. Another time—

As Priscilla turned away, Avise suddenly saw an impression of Calandra tossing her head irritably laid over the agent. The shock was enough to make Avise gnaw his lip fiercely enough to draw blood. _Another time_? What was he saying to himself? It'd be a long time yet.

Avise was stopped from sliding into a reverie of past mistakes when a rapping knock from someone near the front announced the Section Chief's arrival.

Lorenzo marched in with a rapid, stalking pace, speaking as he moved. "Don't stand, don't salute. Alacrity is important this morning and there's no time for banter or usual business.

"As you may have guessed, Operation Painter has failed." Lorenzo paused for a moment to scan the audience, noting which handlers tightened their jaws in expectation of further compounding news, and the more sanguine types who just blinked in incredulous or uncomprehending surprise at the idea that failure was even _possible_. "We've suffered a fatality – Mario Theuma has been shot dead by Padanian militants."

A ripple of murmurs of consternation rolled up the semi-circle of the lecture theatre. Askance glances bumped into, skidded from and tumbled over each other as people looked to their companions for reassurance, but were not willing to meet their eyes through the equal fear of finding that support crumbling. Even the harder-minded handlers, such as Jean, concealed their frowns behind steepled fingers. No handler could ever take on his work without accumulating a certain amount of hubris – even the most level-headed ones used their cyborgs as a right hand of unlimited length, crushing strength, and impregnable armour – and so pointed reminders of their mortality cut especially deeply.

After these cracks ran through the assembled agents' composure, a voice spoke up from near the back.

"What about Dona?"

Lorenzo nodded in a silent, private gesture when he saw that is was Marco who spoke. As Marco had expressed his wish to return to Section Two work following Angelica's death, he had recently been assigned another cyborg and brought back into regular Agency activity. It was impossible not to notice the more forthright attitude that he had adopted – not willing to repeat his attitude of coldness towards Angelica in her declining months, it seemed that Lauro was trying to compensate for past indifference by showing extravagant interest in every minutiae of the cyborgs' life. Lorenzo personally wasn't sure which aspect of Marco he preferred – there was a certain overbalance from keenness to intrusiveness, and he was developing a habit of getting under people's feet – but as he was the first handler to ever be assigned a replacement cyborg, Dr. Bianchi positively delighted in every psych report that he received.

Lorenzo drew in his breath to deliver the worst of the news. "Mario's cyborg Donatello, who we call Dona, is... _unaccounted for_."

The bubbling bed of disconcerted whispers suddenly seethed into hisses and gasps of alarm.

The wave of noise buffeted Lorenzo, and he raised his arm and barked harshly for calm. When the squall had eventually subsided, he continued.

"Allow me to explain the situation fully. For those not informed of the particularities of Op. Painter, Mario and Dona were in Milan to complete an anti-Padania action. Following our extirpation of traitorous elements in the Army last year" – Lorenzo had chosen his words deliberately to gauge Jose's reaction to them, and was disappointed to see him still wince at the memory of his dead friend, who had been involved in the smuggling – "and Jethro and Monique's disruption of the North African trade back in the spring, Padania has been seeking to diversify its sources of weaponry.

"Their latest venture has been to the Balkans. Bosnia has recently begun a process of military cutbacks and disarmament in anticipation of beginning the process of E.U. accession, but certain quantities of arms have not been sold on or melted down but have found their way into criminal possession, and are now being trafficked here."

"Queer form of tribute." Avise grunted, without irony. Lorenzo arched his eyebrows at the handler's condescension.

"Perhaps they are just attuned to the Italian appetite for violence" sighed Bernardo, more to the whole room than to Avise himself. The despondent tone of Bernardo's voice – not a deft hit of acerbic wit, but a dreary concession of fault and failure – also alarmed Lorenzo. Bernardo has always been an animated, gregarious, effusive sort, but since Beatrice had been killed in the St. Mark's farrago and he had returned to being a general support agent that flood of spirit had ebbed away. It wasn't so much that he'd become sullen and withdrawn as fatigued, as though he'd expended a lot of energy in his relentless chatter with Beatrice, but no new infusion had come into refill and revitalise him again. Italian could be beautiful when spoken in full flow – indeed, it was one of the few sounds that Lorenzo didn't mind – and it was dispiriting to see it sound such thin, _enervated _notes.

Lorenzo took his mind off of Bernardo and prevented the audience from becoming maudlin from the agent's remarks by distracting them with Avise. "Mr. Mancini, such cultural supremacy is not part of the Agency mission, please save your opinions for a private forum." Avise blinked very quickly, as though he'd been slapped. Briefly Lorenzo wondered if he'd made the right decision – Avise was a former soldier and disciplined and deferential enough not to fly off at the handle at a cross word, but this episode could well be a memory to store and brood over. Lorenzo decided that he would deal with any potential truculence from the handler when and if it happened, and to concentrate on higher priorities at the current moment.

"To continue – Mario and Dona were to kill a Bosnian broker currently in Milan and prevent a deal from being closed. However, they were anticipated and intercepted before they could launch their attack."

"Is there an information leak?" Alessandro asked suddenly, his past as a spy making him immediately consider the vulnerabilities through which the operation might have been compromised.

"We've no reason to believe that there have been any security breaches recently" Actually there had been, but it wasn't as if Lorenzo would ever have told the handlers that – and besides, the concern wasn't related to Operation Painter specifically. "It's most likely that a man and a young girl walking together in a half-disused industrial estate at two in the morning made guards suspicious." There was no time for full debriefings and assessments now, but Lorenzo still cut a hard edge to his voice to make it clear that he considered Mario to have made a grave error, one which he would expect other fratelli to avoid.

"Ferro and Domenico, the fratello's operational support, reached the site and removed Mario's body before the police could arrive. They had little time to conduct a survey, but they deduced that Mario was killed first, shot by a rifle from range with the hope of confusing Dona so that an assault team could move on her. However, as we all know, a fratello's bonds are not so easily – or cleanly – cut. Dona responded to the assailants approach and..." _Bit through throats, gouged out eyeballs, trampled internal organs into mulch and literally ripped them limb from limb?_ "...killed seven. However, after that, she seems to have wandered off."

"So, we need to find her." Jean's no-nonsense prosaic words cut to the heart of the matter.

"Indeed. That is why all of you have been called here, handlers and support staff alike – Section One is also deploying its entire available operational staff. We need as much manpower as we can muster to set up a dragnet operation to locate and retrieve Dona."

Lorenzo gave a few moments for the assembled Section Two to consider what was required of it. More hubbub rolled along the curve of the theatre seating as the full implication of their chief's understated words sank in. No-one could think of a single occasion where the entire strength of the cyborgs had been massed, let alone the support staff too – and yet here Lorenzo was informing them that not just Section Two but the _entire Social Welfare Agency _was being turned out. The sheer scale of importance invested in Dona was dizzying – this was far more than a manhunt.

The voice of Amadeo jumped up from above the conversation. "Why can't we make the search public? Missing person, child abduction, whatever. Get Dona's 'photo on the local news, we can turn a couple of dozen pairs of eyes into ten thousand, access police data, and pick her up in hours."

Such a strategy would certainly have let everyone have a lie-in, but Lorenzo had to puncture Lorenzo's hopes of an early night with a point of reality. "After this foul-up Padania is now fully aware that a fratello is active in Milan – I don't think it's smart to hand them a big red arrow pointing out exactly who they need to look for!"

Amadeo was suitably chastened, but his intervention had been useful for highlighting an important feature of the ground that they were about to all go over. "I need not emphasise the severity of Dona's situation. Even the lowest polls put Milanese support for Padania or the Northern Association in high sixties – our cyborg is most certainly lost and adrift in _hostile territory_, and we cannot rely upon civilian accommodation and support. The gates of the city are closed to us.

"More importantly, however, Dona is as much a danger to the city as it is to her, if not more so. We are blessed to not have had _many_ opportunities to acquire observational information about how cyborgs cope with the deaths of their handlers, but we are in that situation now and that lack of precise knowledge is dangerous in the extreme. Dona will be _unpredictable_ – highly emotive, irrational, panicky, and," – Lorenzo winced inwardly as he remembered the photos of the dismembered Padanians that Ferro had e-mailed over – "liable to fits of rage. Dona was also on a frequent conditioning course, and these aberrations are likely to only become further aggravated and more pronounced as time passes and its effects fade. It is _imperative _that we reclaim Dona as soon as possible – even leaving aside the possibility of capture by Padanians, or mafia elements seeking a 'trading commodity', inadvertent contact with the public could be nothing short of catastrophic."

Lorenzo swept his gaze around the lecture theatre, making sure that everyone present met his eyes. "There is a time bomb ticking in Milan – a bomb with a fuse that's not measured in seconds but drips of fright, anguish, torment and grief. We don't know when it's going to go off, but for _Dona's own sake_ as much as ours, we need to spare Milan from it.

"Dawn is in two hours. Everyone will have requisitioned concealed radios, prepared two sets of mufti, refuelled their cars and _drawn arms_ by that time. All cyborgs are also to be put in the right frame of mind for street surveillance. Reassemble in the main parking quadrangle, where we will be having a combined briefing with Section One. Now, go!"

* * *

The world bled grey, until it had scabbed concrete over Dona's eyes.

Dona blinked. She felt... rough. A furry tongue and hurting teeth, like that strange sensation you always seem to get when you fall asleep during the day. Her joints felt stiff – flexing just provoked an ache rather than the pleasure of unfolding movement. She had slept, but she had not rested.

Dona blinked again. There was a brief flicker of black from her descending eyelids as she did so, which reassured her that the field of grey in her sight was not due to a vision impairment.

She sat up – although she had to push herself up with her arms instead of just swivelling from the waist, which was disconcerting. As she did so, she felt something smooth slip down and fall away from in front of her; she glanced back down, and saw an unzipped sleeping bag had been laid over her like a blanket.

She looked back up again. She was in some sort of underpass – a straight tar-black industrial canal was before her, while a flat concrete wall faced her on its far bank, more concrete hung over her head, and the bank that she sat on was, again, so much aggregate.

"You okay, kid?"

Dona glanced back to see the source of the noise. Against the wall behind her had been set up a number of boxes and irregular pieces of fibreboard to form a rudimentary shelter. There was also a man. He was dressed in waterproof trousers, a woollen hat and a khaki winter coat (Army Issue Pattern VC-10, Discontinued, Commercial Surplus, her brain thought) which was once thick but was now inescapably threadbare. A thick, unkempt beard with grey hairs suggested someone in his early middle-age. His clothes made it difficult to judge his build precisely, but the way he squatted comfortably showed at least that he was not entirely unfit. He did not appear to have a hostile bearing, nor was he carrying a weapon. Dona judged him to be only a minor and not immediate threat.

Assess the situation. "Is it morning?"

"Has been for a coupla hours."

"What day is it?"

"Um... sorry lass, don't have much use for a calendar. You ha'nt been sleeping-beauty for yonks, though, just the night."

Still Friday, then. "How did I get here?"

"Don't you remember?" The man looked concerned.

"No." She didn't.

The man stood up and stretched, grunting noisily as he did so. A sudden sense of being exposed put Dona on edge. "Well, you woke me up when you came stumbling in and knocked over some of my boxes. Damn near frightened the life out of me, thought it was some Padans come to do one of their 'social clean-ups', the twats – 'scusin my language. Anyway, you picked yourself up, and then without so much as a by-your-leave you walked over there, lay yourself down and was out like a light." There was no hostility in the man's voice – a visitor knocking down his fort just seemed to add interest to the occasion.

Dona looked down at the open sleeping bag covering her legs. "You covered me?"

This made the man a little defensive, as though he'd inferred something more than the simple question itself. "I couldn't let you freeze, could I?"

Antagonising a source of information would not be conducive to reorienting herself. Dona decided to mollify the man and hopefully soothe whatever he had taken offence at. She made an effort at folding the sleeping bag – effectively impossible given the loose and smooth fabric, but her handler had said that it was important to at least be seen to be trying – then stood up and walked over to the man, handing him the bundle. "Thank you very much."

"No trouble, lass." The man seemed appeased. He then jerked his head towards his shelter. "You hungry? I've got plenty of tins. It'll be cold though, soz' – Selly's usually here with light for my fire by now but summat must be keeping him."

Dona was hungry, but she'd been schooled against eating anything that her handler had not approved of in case it had been spiked by poisons and drugs. Their enemies would look for any edge they could get against a cyborg.

"_Never accept candy from a stranger_." Her handler had said.

"No" Dona said.

The man looked unconvinced – the girl seemed as pinched as a winter sparrow, but he wouldn't press her. He could always ask, though. "Wanna talk about it?"

"About what?"

"Why you're down here."

"No."

"You sure? Boys, drugs, I seen it all, I ain't judging." The man would have liked to have thought that the girl – Jesus, she couldn't be more than twelve – was just some happy dreamer off on a big adventure, but these days... _God forgive us all, it's not a world to live in_.

"No."

"Lass," suddenly his eyes became imploring, desperate for contact. "I can listen".

"_NO!_" Dona yelled with sudden violence. The man blanched and instinctively jumped back as though a snake had leapt at him.

"Okay, okay kid, okay." The man raised his hands – except it was a warding gesture, not an expansive sweep of welcome. "It's your life."

"You're right, it _is _my _life._" Dona said, with a bold decisiveness that seemed to spring out of nowhere and surprised even her.

She paused for a moment while the man watched her warily, and then turned her head to look at the light beyond the underpass. She had exhausted this source of its use and so she needed to begin completing a rendezvous with her handler. Without saying farewell, she turned and walked out of the underpass and into the daylight.

The man wasn't finished. "What the hell...?"

The girl had been wearing good clothes. Not just neat clothes but _good _clothes, with almost aristocratic quality. That had just highlighted by contrast that the girl was absolutely filthy – but it had been night then, and dark under the bridge now. He'd assumed that it was just muck, or she been soaked from tripping up into the canal. But now, exposed—

Blood.

The little girl – the young thing that couldn't be more than twelve – was covered _head _to _toe_ in _blood_.

It straggled her hair.

It streaked her face.

It stained her cardigan.

It shone on her shoes.

There were... there were _bits._ On her _fingers_.

Dona stopped. She sensed that a mistake had been made. Always be _seen _to be trying, she remembered. _Appearances matter_, her handler had told her. _That's the very point of cyborgs._

The mistake needed to be corrected. She walked back under the underpass, towards the man who wavered, tugged in different directions by curiosity and fear. Dona calculated from her previous experience with the man that it would be most expeditious to take advantage of this. She fell onto her knees before him

"Help me..." she whimpered, her voice small.

Instinctively the man squatted down, his voice cooing in sympathy. "S'alright, lass," he began, "let it all out—"

Dona looked up. Her eyes were clear.

"I'm sorry".

The first punch crushed the tramp's throat; the second fractured his skull; the third split his neckbone. He never felt even so much as a twinge, and he was dead before he hit the ground.

Dona had somehow lost her radio, so she could not call up Ferro and Domenico in the support unit to arrange a body disposal. Nonetheless, she wasted little time in making use of the resources available, dragging the vagrant's body against the far wall and collapsing his shelter on top of him. It wouldn't stand up to detailed scrutiny, but a passer-by would just see a heap of fly-tipped waste.

The drifter had mentioned other visitors, one of them apparently frequent. That was a frustrating complication, and it increased risk of discovery. On balance, though, it would not be operationally relevant – from the circumstances she judged that Painter had been aborted, and thus she needed to arrange a rendezvous with her handler, and then she and her handler could be extracted and removed from the operational theatre, where none of this would matter anymore to she and Mario—

Mario—

Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario

Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario

Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario

Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario

Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario

Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario Mario

Dona fell onto her knees, scrabbled forward a few crawling paces until her head was over the blackness of the canal edge, and was then violently, explosively sick. The vomit settled on the water like scum.

* * *

(Continued)


	2. Chapter 2 Friday Afternoon

Particles in the water sometimes glitter like smooth sand – but the River Po, after hundreds of miles of travel across the northern plain, brought many souvenirs with it on its long journey in the form of dense sediment. Here, Marisa did not rise up through a swirl of iridescent crystal shards; she practically _walked_ up a shifting, slippery wodge of slurry.

As Marisa broke the surface of the river (almost literally – there was so much material in the water she swore that it had a meniscus) and let the distorted mumble of Milan's city sounds roar and cry in her ears again, Elio surfaced near her. They both bobbed on the surface for a moment, their filled buoyancy jackets making them feel like rotund gourmet lords, before Marisa spoke. "Sir, I cannot see a _centimetre_ in this muck. Dona could be doing backflips with the Brazilian synchronised swimming team" – it sounded as though she'd been rehearsing that line – "and I'd be none the wiser. It is a waste. Of. Time."

You take her diving like she wants, and she complains about the type... kids. They're never ever satisfied, are they?

Elio raised his goggles to fix Marisa with a penetrating glare. "Marisa. Do you know how much your eyes cost?"

Marisa shook her head. "No doubt you're going to tell me, though."

"Less of the lip. And it's four million euros. _Each._ Altogether's there's enough bleeding-edge science stuffed in you to pay for a couple of high-end fighter-jets... and from what I've been seeing lately, the jets would be a damn sight more useful!"

Elio could see Marisa's lip tremble and he wondered if he'd maybe pushed too far with his chastisement – even if thrashing about in a river in a tantrum wouldn't cause much in the way of property damage, another Moment would be an unhelpful delay. He was committed now, though, and in the absence of conditioning to appropriately fence the unbidden mind he sometimes needed to give Marisa a rough shove to knock her back into place. "Now, Marisa, the _brochure_ which came with your _original packaging_ assured me that those fabulously expensive eyes can zoom, have wider focal range, sharper resolution, flexible corneas with consciously adaptable shapes, perfect vision in the peripheral zone, and some sensitivity to infra-red and ultraviolet as well. If you don't want me to send you back to the _factory_ for _false advertising_, I suggest that you _use_ them!"

The handler and cyborg replaced their regulators and dived again.

* * *

Appearances matter. Whether it's a uniform, dirty boiler suits, a tribal costume or this season's in-style, people will identify you and judge you by how you look – and it's not unreasonable to do so. We have eyes, and why shouldn't sight be used to explore a person as much as the other senses? Anyone who protested that appearances were superficial and irrelevant was flatly wrong; she who stood on her supposed inner worth, but wasn't willing to invest the modicum of effort needed to appear presentable to others and communicate that, was a self-centred and indolent hypocrite.

Then, of course, with appearances came the principles of disguise, which the cyborgs – sweet, unassuming girls with deadly potential concealed within their frames – were the very embodiment of. To do well, it was not sufficient for Dona just to fight, but to always be attentive to her presentation – and if nothing else, it helped to dignify dirty work.

That was what Mario had always said, and what Dona had always followed. This was a strange day, though, and it was the first time that she'd proven Mario's rule by the negative.

Dona had washed in the canal – hardly ideal, but the best that she could do – clearing off the worst and most obvious bloodstains which would have prevented her moving abroad. A consequence of this is that the body fluids had been replaced by a film of grime, damp clothes and a reeking aura, and it seemed to disprove Mario's rule – as she walked down the street, people were more inclined to avert their gaze and not pay attention to her.

Appearances matter though, Mario said that attention to appearance was necessary for disguise and distracting attention. Why was he wrong?

Dona was confused.

She didn't want to be confused – she wanted a clear head. Without a clear head, she couldn't concentrate, and if she couldn't concentrate, she couldn't complete her missions, and if she couldn't complete her missions, she couldn't be part of the Agency, and if she couldn't be part of the Agency...

...she couldn't stay like this. She needed to set things onto an even keel, and then she could proceed with the proper procedures. Her training would lead her to safety, but she needed certain equipment before a drill could commence.

Blessedly, with Milan as a fashion capital there was little difficulty in finding a clothes shop on whatever random road she happened to be on now, rather than having to expose herself in a high street.

Appearances matter, as Mario said, and deadly skill was best expressed in clipped, precise, quiet, calm efficiency – the whispering stiletto, not the lurching claymore. The same result with an economy of effort, the claw lashing out and then retracting again as if it was never there – that was the discriminating placement of an expert, and cyborgs had been crafted by experts. There was no-one to kill here, but even so she went to work without a fuss. She couldn't loiter and sidle her way along the shelves because her smell would mark her out, so she just walked in, grabbed a suitable set of street clothes, and walked out – when a man in a beige shirt and a peak cap challenged her she just flipped him over a rack of blouses, and that was that.

Appearances matter, and she appeared to have done well.

* * *

The boy was good, Jose had to give him that – he didn't even notice him until Henrietta had asked if the young man who was always between fifteen and twenty metres behind them was an accompaniment from Section One.

Jose glanced back at the reflection of a shop window to confirm it, espying a New York Yankees baseball cap in amidst the coats and jackets of other pedestrians. It stood out now, of course, but to a casual inspection it was obvious enough to be clashing, clashing enough to be cheap, cheap enough to be common, and so common enough to not be conspicuous.

Jose took hold of Henrietta's hand and squeezed a message in Morse to her. It was a method of communication that he'd considered to inhibit eavesdropping and still appear outwardly natural in public, but it looked as though that it was one innovation that wasn't going to take root, as unfortunately Henrietta didn't have much aptitude for it – this time it took three full attempts for her to press back that she understood. In order to not betray anything to the tail, though, Jose had been staring ahead the entire time and so didn't notice that Henrietta's cheeks were blazing crimson and her eyes wandering dreamily for the whole exchange.

The fratello turned back towards Zone One – the dissonantly plain and mechanical name for Milan's old city. They ambled around the Piazzo del Duomo and spent a long time gazing, enchanted, at the white jewel of the cathedral (and out in the open at the middle of the square where any loiterer would be exposed), but their tail spent the time using the statuary as a jungle gym, to the exasperation of the Piazzo's heritage official. They wandered through the Galleria Vittorio and Jose let Henrietta skip from boutique to boutique, with his credit card dutifully waddling along behind her – it had to take a rest in Jose's pocket after it treated her to a new coat (and leggings, and boots) for the lengthening Autumn. In the meantime, their reticent companion had taken a rest in a café on the corner of the L-shaped arcade, and sipped at a cola until the fratello made a definite move towards either exit. Jose and Henrietta sat on a bench before La Scala and talked (what he privately hoped was) knowledgeably about opera – however, a worried Jose had to cut that delay short when Henrietta repeated for the fourth time that she really enjoyed her visit to the Teatro dell'Opera last Christmas, but couldn't describe anything else about the show that they went to see. Trying to find a sense of culture that Henrietta didn't have such a compromisingly personal investment in, Jose led her to the Monumental Cemetery to admire the Grecian sculpture. Henrietta smiled for Jose's sake – if he liked it, it had to be good – but Jose could tell that she found the funerary culture somewhat ghoulish, and seeing the Palanti Chapel, dedicated to Milanese killed in concentration camps during the war, gave Jose himself an uncomfortable pang of his grandfather.

In short, the fratello did all within their means to convey themselves as a perfectly ordinary pair of tourists meandering idly through the city guidebook, and so bore their tail into believing that he'd latched onto the wrong targets and give the chase up as a bad job. Alas, despite their efforts Jose could still espy the boy ducking behind the larger headstones in a very impious and improprietous way.

He had kept up with them as nimbly as a flea, and had stuck to them as tightly as a tick... and was about half as appealing as a cockroach.

"Henrietta, I appreciate having a fanclub but this supporter, as enthusiastic as he is, is getting a bit needy. We'll head back to an urban area and set up an alley ambush for him. Do you remember the drills?"

"Yes, Jose." Henrietta nodded simply, but her eyes blinked uncertainly, as though she was unsure if Jose was implying something about her in the same breath. The shadow over her face passed quickly, though – Jose hadn't meant anything and Henrietta defaulted to thinking the best of her handler.

Quickly leaving the Monumental Cemetery, Jose and Henrietta strode back into the city with a renewed sense of purpose – the tail caught on again quickly, and he had evidently detected the energy in their movement. His excitement at his patience finally paying off and taking him to the fratello's bolt-hole was palpable in how closely he now stuck to his marks – the boy may have had a talent for shadowing, but the young one still lacked experience because he was now making obvious mistakes of overexposure.

The alley that Jose settled on was ideal – a backstreet between two tall buildings which was narrow and shady, with a corner about which to hide and odd pieces of furniture, ranging from bins to steps leading up to side-doors, which created a bottleneck and made escape difficult. Jose made an exaggerated show of turning his head about in wide arcs looking for pursuit, so giving the impression that he hadn't noticed it already, and then ushered Henrietta into the gloom.

The tail stopped at the threshold, sensing the dangers of the location, and visibly wavering over whether to press on boldly into the breach or admit that he'd been outmanoeuvred. A gust of something – probably an earlier mention of a reward – rippled through and straightened him out, though, and after a moment of pacing about in a circle at the alley edge (drawing a few odd stares from other pedestrians, but no more than that) to work up the courage, he scampered in.

The first blow rammed him back against a wall with a winding impact; the second neatly caught him under the chin and snapped his head back to bounce off the wall with the solid _thunk_ of jarred bone. Henrietta was holding one forearm across his chest like a restraining bar, applying enough pressure to only allow him to take small sips of air and effectively pinning him. Her pistol was pressed up into the flesh underneath his jaw, with the hammer cocked and ready to geyser his brainpan up the next three stories if he was inclined to difficult.

Jose gave the tail a few seconds to recover, taking the opportunity to study him as he spluttered and hacked. The tail was literally a boy – little more than a foot higher than Henrietta herself, in his early teens with visible acne, a thin, rakish build and a cheap, crinkly plastic tracksuit with dirty trainers which spoke of an indolent lack of care for his presentation, or at the very least a poor background.

"What's your name, son?" Jose affected a casually superior manner, leaning a shoulder against a wall and inspecting the underside of his nails for dirt.

"Adriano!" The boy gasped.

Henrietta pushed a small but earnest crush of weight onto the boy's chest.

"Ignazio!" He croaked.

Henrietta pushed the pistol barrel further up into the boy's head, causing him to gag as his developing adam's apple was pushed against his throat.

"Jesus! Fuck! _Costanzo!_" He managed.

Jose grunted and shook his head, as though he still didn't believe the boy but was bored with the exchange. "Eh, whatever, that'll do. And _don't_ blaspheme."

'Costanzo's eyes darted about in their sockets, like a trapped rat scrabbling and turning for a way out. Looking for escape, and _not_ pleading for it – this boy had evidently scampered along the more verminous runs of the city for some time.

"Look at me!" Jose barked.

Constanzo's pupils did swivel over to Jose, although they continually quivered, as though they were hopping up and down on their feet and impatient to run off again.

"So – Costey – mind telling me what you're doing following me?" Jose lowered his voice to a harsh, grating growl, asphalt being scraped off the back of his throat and spat at his prisoner.

Costanzo squirmed and tried to shout for help – even though concealed by bins and the gloom, the street was scarcely thirty yards away – but thanks to Henrietta's effective containment he wasn't able to muster the breath for a yell.

"Costey, the only reason why my girl here hasn't _crushed your balls_ just for _wasting our afternoon_ is that she is a sweet, innocent, unblemished angel and I'd rather not expose her to such crude and disgusting things. Also, it's probably a waste of effort because I doubt that yours have even dropped. So, word of advice – _don't try to be clever._

"In the mood to talk?"

Jose had been expecting surly, obnoxious rebellion which leaked from teenagers of that age like grease from their pores to make the boy persist for a while longer, but what he actually said practically bowled the handler over in astonishment.

"Sorry, but it's against the code. You know I can't betray my client's confidentiality."

Code? Client? _CONFIDENTIALITY? _Jesus H. Christ, did he hear that right? Jose was tempted to give the rancid and raggedy urchin a clip round the ear for being a smart-alec, but Costanzo had intoned his words with all seriousness. What did he think he was, a mafia don? Maybe the boy lacked youthful rebellion, but he certainly had a gross glut of arrogance and self-absorption to compensate.

"Very well then, Master Costanzo, with your, aha, laudable professional ethic I'm sure that you won't hold what's coming against me – after all, _it's just business_." Jose turned to Henrietta. "Remove your safety and count to twenty. If I haven't ordered you to stand down by the time that you've finished, kill him."

Henrietta responded with a small click as her thumb flicked her pistol's safety-catch.

Costanzo's eyes goggled for a moment – if the safety had been on, he could have got away! – and then punctured and deflated again with the despair that his best chance had now passed (which was precisely the intended effect).

"I can pay you!"

"Certainly. With the information I want."

"I'm just a kid!"

"Ain't that the truth."

"That gun'll make noise!"

"Integrated silencer."

Henrietta had been counting silently, which only unnerved Costanzo even more – you can't dodge what you can't see, and death could snap on him as rapidly as a guillotine. He hissed in anxiety, and his voice cracked, flailing for an escape.

"This... it's murder. It's wrong. The cops'll do you."

Jose laughed.

The noise shattered Costanzo's resolve with a rain of hammer-blows – his face crumpled into a scrunched-up jumble of flesh, as though he would break out into tears. He knew that he was beaten, and the taste was bitter.

"Fuck, OK? OK! Fuck!"

"Stop, please." Jose said simply.

"Eighteen." Henrietta declared, not changing her position.

Costanzo choked and gagged for a few seconds as he struggled to suck in deep breaths around the iron bars of Henrietta's pinioning arms.

"An old guy at the Café Marmo on the Viale Fulvio Teste. Long black coat, red scarf, grey hair – _bald patch_. Called me over and told me to follow you while you were passing. Gave me fifty _sacchi_ then, said there'd be a hundred more if I called him to tell where you two ended up."

"Call? You have a 'phone?"

Costanzo winced at having let something else slip. "Left pocket."

Jose felt around Costanzo's tracksuit and pulled the item out – a noticeably expensive 3G model. Jose whistled. "Very swish."

"'Cos it ain't mine, innit?" Despite his compromised situation, Costanzo grinned with pride at his thieving little fingers. The smile was suddenly wiped away when Jose slipped the 'phone into his own pocket.

"Hoi, you fuckin' rotter! I—"

"Listen, Costey, your reedy little voice is getting on my nerves, so just shut up and go buy a new one." Jose reached into another pocket, pulled out his fat bribery roll (the inner half was actually just strips of newspaper – budget cuts – but at a glance it still looked impressive) and flicked off two hundred and fifty euros' worth of notes, making sure that Costanzo could see the amount, and then pressed the money into the boy's pocket. Costanzo's eyes widened in surprise, and even though there was little light in the alley, they gleamed with the sheen of greed.

"When you're done, 'phone your 'client' and tell him that we're staying in" – he thought of somewhere which sounded suitably midrange – "the Hotel Serena, room whatever. That fair?"

Costanzo nodded, and tried what he must have thought was a friendly, endearing smile but came across as the peeled, knife-gash grin of a guttersnipe, one of the repositories for waste souls when the good ones had been used up in other people.

"OK, now we're mates, mind tellin' your _ragazza _to let me go? I—" Costanzo gargled as Henrietta drew a foot up and very firmly kicked him in the shin.

"I think that we're done. Release him." Henrietta did so, stepping back smartly as Costanzo crashed down onto the cobblestones of the alley, chest heaving for breath. After half a minute of wheezed obscenities, with the fratello as a bored audience, Costanzo pulled himself back upright, leaning against the wall for support, and then hobbled off back into the daylight, not looking back.

Once the tail had been chased off, Jose slumped back against a wall himself and sighed deeply, massaging his eyes and suddenly feeling very fatigued. He was well capable of acting the hard bastard – it was a chief persona in interrogations and a necessary part of training – but he took no pleasure from the grim chore. More to the point, shaking off the grip of the grasping little runt had just cost them over three precious hours at a time when minutes beaded like pearldrops, during which Dona – poor, beleaguered Dona – could have been slipping into ever more dire straits.

Jose opened his eyes again when he felt an insistent tug on her sleeve. Henrietta was looking up at him, with an anxious expression of concern.

"Ah, s'ok, 'Etta." Jose gave her a wan smile and ruffled the cyborg's hair slightly (provoking an almost comical squawk of surprise). "It's done now, and you did it perfectly. Let's get going."

The scintillating drop of praise drowned out the girl's frustration at her hair being put out of shape. Henrietta beamed broadly, adjusted her headband and skipped gaily back out into the street.

They'd gone down a couple more roads when Henrietta pulled up suddenly, a look of utter dismay transfixing her features. "Oh, Jose, no! No! We have to go back!"

Alarm quivered through Jose's body. "What's the matter, Henrietta?" He asked tensely.

Henrietta gnawed her lip in anxiety before replying. "I left your gifts in the alley!"

* * *

The white unmarked Ford Transit was the conveyance of the common labourer - low enough to be generic, and ubiquitous enough to be unremarkable. No-one had the wit to see anything untoward, then, when one such van had set itself in car park at the beginning of the day and not moved since, without anyone going in or getting out – a white van wasn't a vehicle, it was street furniture.

An egg-timer rang. "Sir? Our two hours are up."

Chief Draghi nodded to his subordinate who was sitting at one of the radio consoles, and then reached up to the cupboard above his own seat and pulled out a device that had been stowed there. It looked like an ordinary credit-card reader, and it beeped like one too as Draghi keyed in a code. The machine shrieked and buzzed for a moment, and then stuck a tongue of a sticker at the Section One commander. Draghi grinned, tore it off, and then reaching through a panel leading into the driver's compartment, stuck his new parking ticket onto the side window.

He loved his little toy. He wished he could take it home with him.

Closing the drivers' access panel, Draghi turned back into the van's cargo compartment and surveyed the scene with a prideful, proprietorial air. The compartment was densely-packed, but not cramped, with the space efficiently used and well-gauged to give each occupant what he required. Draghi had a desk for himself from which he could direct the search, and there were three other Section One agents crewing the vehicle – two radio operators who were monitoring the progress of the various fratelli and other teams roving over Milan, and a guard who was examining the external cameras to make sure that no-one was trying to sneak up and plant a crafty car bomb underneath the rear bumper.

Draghi set himself back down at his own desk. Before him was a map of Milan, although it looked closer to a Spirograph than a city plan – Draghi was continuously tracing lines onto the map as he worked out new search patterns and hypothesised likely routes that Dona could have taken from her first point of contact with the Padanians. There were also a pair of flat computer screens held up on armatures through which he could update information electronically, but Draghi liked to always keep paper backups; there was always that nagging sense that something wasn't authentic unless it stained your fingers, that it could be condensed into material substance – a holdover from Draghi's garrulous grandfather who had hectored against and constantly berated his son for his 'soft' white-collar work. His grandfather had hated his father as a 'class traitor' and had estranged himself from Draghi's family in his own bubble of impotent loathing, reflecting his senseless miseries back at himself; it was a pointless waste of a life, but even so the sheer force of his conviction still left some impression on his grandson – and Draghi definitely did want to make sure that this operation obtained something of material substance. Even though the Director insisted that the two Sections of the Agency performed equal, complementary roles, you had to be blind to deny that the Hitman Barbies over in Section Two were matted in the sticky glitter-glue that bedazzled everyone; well, now in bailing out Section Two and cleaning up their mess it would be Section One's turn to shine – and woth the wholesome integral brightness of real worth, not the chintzy costume gleam of sheer expense that was all Section Two could tout.

One of the radio operators interrupted Draghi's reverie. "Sir? I've been listening in on the police network, and there's a couple of items of interest that have come up."

"Alright, fire away." Draghi was immediately attentive.

The radio operator checked his notepad. "One's a homicide – some drifter's just reported that he's found one of his mates beaten over the head. The scene's apparently a few hours old."

Draghi frowned. "That's unfortunate, but I don't see the relevance."

"The location, sir – grid 2498 7654."

Draghi scanned his map, and abruptly did a double-take – that was almost on top of the original contact zone! He bit back a curse of frustration. They'd had to begin the search a certain radius away from the location where Theuma was killed in order to prevent colliding with police who had still been inspecting the site... and so Dona had eluded the Agency by hiding in her own shadow!

"The second item then, Luigi?" Draghi growled.

"Shoplifting – but one apparently committed by a young girl, _and _it left a security guard with broken bones, too. Grid 2622 7184."

"Get back onto Rome, instruct one of our computer staff to pull any camera data for that shoplifting that may have been put on the police files, and wire it here. Let's see if we need to update Dona's description." The radio operator acknowledged the order and replaced his headset.

Draghi turned back to his map, opened a pair of compasses and started drawing circles around the two locations that had been highlighted to him, seeing where the various rings overlapped. He tapped the paper with his pencil.

"Just where are you hiding, you little runt?"

* * *

Dona was sitting on a park bench, sedulously chewing through her fourth ham and cheese baguette with quiet industry. When she had been changing she'd found several banknotes in her old clothes – even though they were damp from when she had sloshed about in the canal, the kiosk owner had sniffed Dona's lingering smell and decided that he wasn't going to get anything better from the girl.

This was an important part of her preparation for extraction. If she did not have an adequate supply of energy, she would be impairing her abilities and that would leave her ill-equipped to deal with escalating threats that might reveal themselves – and a cyborg had to be able to best any enemy at any time, otherwise the government might as well use ordinary soldiers. She already had a lot to make up for—

Dona crammed down the last of the baguette a little more quickly than she should have done.

Taking a moment to catch a breath, Dona then lifted her thigh and pulled out the other three sandwich wrappers from underneath her leg. Taking meticulous, therapeutic care in smoothing the crumpled sheets against the wood of the bench and then folding them precisely over each other, she stood up and walked over to a bin to deposit them.

Then the cyborg stopped, and realised something about what she'd just been doing.

Steps approached – the clack of fine shoes and the hard rap of a walking stick's steel ferrule banged with stern authority, and an imperious matriarchal voice matched their timbre. "Young lady, you are a _disgrace_!"

Dona didn't turn to the speaker, but the interjection did make her jump – and the little ragged corners of white that had been slowly bleeding out of her hands suddenly spurted out into a stream of torn paper confetti that spattered away in the wind.

"Just what do you think you're _doing_?" The arrival – an elderly woman – had a red ring of a mouth set into a perfect O of outrage. "The bin is right there in front of you, and yet you're scattering litter about anyway! In all my years, you are the _depth_ of juvenile _insolence!_" The woman smacked her stick hard against the pathway, causing the ferrule to sound out like a judge's condemning gavel. "And look at someone who's talking to you! Did your _parents _teach you no _manners_?"

At the command, the girl actually did turn around, and even in full castigating spate the woman was checked and taken aback by the hollow desolation that she was confronted by – a face cratered by two eye-sockets, with pupils at their nadir like pits of cold ash.

"What else could I have done?" The voice was small, plaintive, like a thin wind over an empty landscape. Then she was gone, already running away at the far end of the park and sight of her just a blur beyond the strength of the woman's prescription.

The woman was perturbed, but then tipped her disquiet away down the corners of a disapproving frown. Well, the girl could make some pace – at least she wasn't some fat slob from television and computers like most children her age. Some consolation.

* * *

The rap on the door made Lauro jump in shock, and he dropped his binoculars – he was only spared beaning some hapless pedestrian two stories below with them because the lanyard caught around his neck and briefly choked him instead.

Stumbling backwards from the window into the room and banging his knee against the table-edge as he did so, Lauro spluttered and cursed his way over to the door, feeling for the derringer in his pocket as he did so. He felt vaguely ridiculous; such a tiny weapon seemed more suited to a woman in her handbag alongside her compact and lipstick, and the very existence of the wretched thing was demeaning, but he was anxious about people noticing the bulges of full-sized weapons.

Lauro put his back against the wall by the door, licking his lips nervously as he mustered the breath to speak. He was anxious about a lot of things these days – he couldn't dare admit it to his comrades, but that confrontation with the communists back in the spring had badly shaken him and even now his nerves were still quite sensitive and jittery. He worried about the effect that it was having on his performance, and he feared about not being able to get it under control before the others thought it time to comment on it (they must have noticed it by now, they couldn't not have...)—

A second, angrier burst of rapping made Lauro jump again – if his weapon's safety hadn't been on he would have gouged a chunk out of his own thigh. Cursing himself inwardly, he stammered out the challenge.

"W-w-whaddya want?" Try – _try! _– to sound surly, scare off the salesmen.

"It's Alessio. Let me in, dickhead!" The correct procedure. He would have shouted "Hurry up, willya?" if he had been compromised. Why did it have to be so angry, though?

Relaxing a fraction, Lauro managed to keep his hands steady enough to unbolt the door and admit Alessio into the apartment. No sooner had the door been shut and rebolted, though, then Alessio grasped the other man by the scruff of the neck and shoved him roughly against the corridor wall.

"What the _fuck_, Lauro?" Alessio snarled. "Just what sort of fucking _game_ do you think you're playing?"

Lauro's blinked in incomprehension. "What--? I don't understand—"

"No, of course you don't, faggot." Alessio grunted, pushing Alessandro forward into the main room, before stabbing a finger at the open window. "_I _saw it on the _way _up! Leaning out the _window_ with you fucking _binoculars_ for everyone to gawp at? Jesus wept, just what sort of act are you putting on, some socially retarded peeping tom trying to catch a glimpse of girls in their bits?" Alessio shook his head in bafflement. "Let's just hope that the cops don't follow up on it because they think that it'd be too fucking _stupid _for Padanians to behave!"

Lauro was physically cringing from Alessio's castigation. Seeing this, Alessio threw his eyes heavenwards. "For Christ's sake, Lauro, learn to take a bit of criticism and get over it already. Now, what did you call me over here for?"

Pleased at having something specific to fix his mind and attention on, Lauro ushered Alessio towards the window – correcting himself and taking a few steps back from it when he sensed Alessio tense up again – and handed him his binoculars. "Look there."

Alessio squinted through the binoculars. "Looks like the news chopper, it's got the right livery." He remarked.

"Aha!" Lauro's eyes lit up in the delight at finally having something concrete to contribute. Alessio's inquisitive eyes followed Lauro as he went over to the other side of the room and clicked on a radio resting on a chest of drawers.

"_A lorry shedding its load means that two lanes are still blocked southbound on the Lakes Motorway between junctions five and..._" A traffic report droned.

"_That's _where the news helicopter is right now." Lauro said excitedly. "And the A8 is right on the other side of the city!"

Alessio thought for a moment, and then took a hard stare through the binoculars at the helicopter he could see, currently making a long, lazy curve out of sight.

"That _can't_ be a civilian helicopter!" Lauro's words were almost tumbling over each other in his rush to get them out and finally show a contribution. "It's _disguised_! The government's interested in something!"

Alessio paused, then looked carefully at Lauro, and then he was sweeping out of the apartment, already tapping numbers on a mobile 'phone that he had slipped out of his trouser pocket. He unbolted the door in a trice, and his only farewell was the bang of it closing shut after him.

Lauro was left alone, fretting if he had done well or not.

* * *

(Continued)


	3. Chapter 3 Saturday

Dawn on Saturday was stillborn – it emerged, but it had no vitality. Clouds had scudded over during the night and now the light was smothered by a curtain of rain.

The dense clouds and generally inclement weather had also forced the grounding of the helicopter that had been requisitioned for the search, so now Jean was trudging along a path, feeling the creeping, crawling sensation of water infiltrating down his raincoat's collar, and what it was like to be quite literally brought down to earth. Rico seemed to be doing her utmost to lift herself back up, though – she was certainly making equivalent noise to a helicopter as she ran up and down the path and around Jean, every few seconds jumping up to splash down in another puddle with a clap of happy laughter. Her galoshes were slick with water and the hem of her coat was also fringed by an edge of damp.

Rico's noise blasted Jean and set his teeth on edge, the molars grinding each other and etching frustration and anger into him. He couldn't tolerate the slow, cutting pain, and prised his teeth apart by instead giving voice to a vicious, evil snarl.

"Give it a _rest_, will you, Rico? You're not sighting from the helicopter anymore, but that doesn't mean that this is a break! Now, _work!_ With that racket I can't even _hear _myself _think_!"

Rico was squatting down for another jump, and as Jean spoke she aborted it into a fitful spasm of a misfired hop instead of a great flying artillery-strike down into the next puddle. Her gay expression flattened into level, formal seriousness. "Yes, sir." She acknowledged simply.

_Hear..._

Jean's words had concentrated Rico onto a certain type of sensation. All around her rain was falling - the rustle of it skating down long grasses; the shiver of it rippling through puddles; the throb of it dancing off of the tarmac...

...and the slap of it slapping against plastic.

Jean was immediately quiet and attentive as he saw Rico's head twitching as she tuned and filtered her hearing to discern a particular sound. After a short while, Rico spun round to a new heading, marched off into the grass, and then with a flourish and the delight of a diviner finding water, lifted up an earpiece and radio, dangling them both by the connecting cable like a hunter with a brace of snipe.

The handler considered the cyborg's happy countenance for a few sodden, sopping-wet seconds.

"We already know that Dona's lost her radio. Rico, that's totally useless."

* * *

It was a mild night – dark, but dark in the way that it was when you wrapped the bed blanket around yourself into a cosy cocoon. You almost didn't need a jacket.

Further to the warmth of the night was the coddling bands of Mario's smooth, reassuring voice.

"Donatello, we're coming up to the point where we have to split off, but you'll do as well as always."

No qualifications, only conviction and certainty with no doubt or mealy, weaselling ambiguity. Dona liked that very much – it was her rock.

"Donatello, tell me what you're going to do."

Dona shifted her rucksack – which outwardly appeared the sort of bag that any sort of schoolchild would be carrying, but which actually contained her weapons – from shoulder to shoulder as she tested the cables that anchored her to that rock. "The trade is scheduled to occur in the warehouse where the security guard has been paid off to not raise alarms. I am to take advantage of my small size and enter the building to conceal myself in advance of the arrival of the Padanian and Bosnian parties for the trade. Once it begins I am to intervene and prioritise the killing of the Bosnian trader, although as a secondary objective I am to take advantage of my strength and agility to remain engaged for as long as possible and maximise killing of Padanians and Bosnian agents. Should the primary target escape, I am to alert you where you will advance from your reserve position to intercept him" – Dona turned to Mario and smiled – "but that of course won't be necessary." She couldn't put her handler in the way of harm, after all."

"Donatello, you really don't have to be so didactic about these things, I keep telling you that." Mario chided gently, shaking his head with a tired smile as he did so.

Dona knew that, but the need to be methodical was impressed into her, as a... as a _precaution_ which had guided careful steps down a path which stretched back to a place far behind the environs of the Agency. With her handler to support her, such dependency ought to no longer be necessary and it aggrieved Dona to lapse back into it – but the heavier chains took time to unwrap.

"Donatello, don't worry about it, I'm glad that you have your head on straight regardless." Mario saw his cyborg's expression of disquiet and squeezed her shoulder firmly. That reassuring sense of presence normally cheered her up, but a perturbed expression infiltrated across him when he saw that Dona's sense of disquiet didn't fade.

"Donatello, what's the matter?"

Dona's eyes quivered, pupils flicking from corner to corner as she swept her gaze around the full field of sight and fire. "There are multiple figures moving ahead of us, sir."

Mario glanced forwards, squinting as he struggled to distinguish activity through the gloom. Buildings loomed up every side of the street as dark walls, and the street-lamps poured out a turgid flow of mucky sodium yellow glow onto the ground below them, rolling across the environment in a two-tone half-light. Black and yellow... hazard stripes.

"Donatello, keep moving forward with me. Ready yourself for combat, but do not get out your weapons or make any move to attack until I say so." A frown deepened across Mario's face. Maybe they were just workers on a late shift... they could fight their way out of an ambush, but undue alarmism would scupper the entire mission.

The fratello continued forward until the pair reached the junction where they were to part. Dona looked around her, but not down the street where she was supposed to head. "Sir...

"...we're surrounded."

Mario stood very still.

"Donatello, my girl... I'm afraid that I've just gone and done something very stupid."

Then a hole appeared in Mario's chest. Then his eyes became stark and wild. Then he opened his mouth. Then a report snapped off of their ears. Then blood fountained out of Mario's face. Then it spattered across Dona's own.

Then Dona opened her eyes. Heavy, fat raindrops slapped against them - the bush that she'd wormed underneath for cover had become saturated from the rain and now water was rolling and dribbling off of the twigs and leaves and draining down onto her.

Donatello clenched herself into a ball and cried for a while.

* * *

The whole square was soaking wet as rain continued to sluice along the gutters. Even so, the speaker seemed determined to beat off the water with the sheer blazing power of fiery oratory, stalking from one end of the pavement to the other, gesticulating wildly, and booming out a loud holler, as though the passion of conviction coiled within him snapped out with energy beyond that which could be contained with words.

"Seven! _Seven_! Seven _deaths_!" he yelled, hammering home his indignation. "Murder may be a tragic fact of life since Cain slew Abel, but _seven_? Our city, beautiful Milan, where every brick is a work of art, is being debased into a _playing field_ for _foreign _gangs to play out their barbaric customs on!"

A canopy of umbrellas rustled in applause. Even despite the dismal conditions, the speaker had managed to attract over a hundred listeners – which spoke well of the commendably aware and active political and civic consciousness in Milan, or at least the organisational ability of the Northern Association to up-end party members out of bed on the weekend. A couple of miserable-looking, washed-out journalists stood together at one side of the speaker – their cagoules rubbed up against each other in shared despondency, as one futilely tried to shield her Dictaphone from the downpour while the other kept jabbing his pen at his drooping, damp notebook to stop the shorthand that he was jotting down from dribbling off into the ground.

"Is this the prosperity that the government promised us? The energy that _fresh blood_" – the speaker spat, although his bile was immediately lost amongst the rain – "was to bring to our city? The violence – the _battle_ – that _immigrants _inflicted on Milan yesterday only proves it further; that foreign 'cultures' do not bring wealth but only import their wretched tribes and gangs and conflicts, spreading the disease of disorder to another land – _our _land!"

The umbrellas rustled again, only now a few of them were knocked to one side as a pair of figures pushed forward towards the front.

"How does he know that the people Dona killed weren't Italians? Because his organisation was the one who _sent _them there in the first place!" Hilshire growled under his breath.

"Hilshire, we don't have _time_ for this..." Triela hissed through gritted teeth, glancing around her constantly in case there were militants amongst the crowd who recognised the fratello for what they were and tried to make a grab for the shotgun bag over her shoulder.

"Call it a secondary objective, then." Hilshire grunted back and he levered a passage through the listeners, who were wedged together to share each other's cover as much as they were unified in ideological solidarity. "Limiting Padania's influence and effectiveness, by showing this fool up."

The speaker was in full imperious flow over the fratello's bickering. "Why do we have them? Why are they here? When the tide of _Mare Nostrum _washes them in on their dismal little rafts – like rats in the ship's bilge – they flounder onto the shores of Sicily, or the Pelagies. So how do they end up here?" The speaker puffed out his cheeks, the answer being obvious to him. "The government _knows_ they're a disruptive, worthless presence, and _sends_ them here. We – the beautiful, ancient Milanese – are being used as human landfill!"

The speaker's voice rose to a _crescendo fortissimo_, matched lustily by the listeners, now transformed into respondents – some casual racism, dressing in the laurels of old imperial glory (ironic, given that Rome was certainly not founded in Lombardy), and the persecution complex of southern conspiracy tweaked all the right knobs for producing loud volume.

Hilshire was quieter and suppressed noise rather than created it, but the presence he emitted in the crowd was no less potent. "I don't think that it's right to call them worthless."

"Welcome, my fellow European cousin – and thank you for your excellent Italian, it's a great honour that you took the time to learn it. Would you like to contribute something to the gathering?" Hilshire had to concede that the speaker had some ability – despite the quivering rage that had propelled his previous hectoring, he had spun his personality about on a dime and changed his disposition completely, meeting an unscheduled interloper with a pleasant smile, not as an interfering antagonist but as a fellow participant in discourse. He didn't even comment on the sallow-skinned girl beside Hilshire. If he didn't know better, Hilshire would have thought that he was interested in working out a mutually acceptable resolution.

"I just see that these communities actually have quite a lot to contribute." Hilshire offered, as Triela shifted her feet uncomfortably and struggled to resist the urge to wrap her arms around her handler and bodily drag him to cover and safety before he exposed himself to a bullet. Good grief, the war ended over sixty years ago! Why did Germans still have this neurotic obsession with overcompensating for something?

"For instance, they willingly perform a wide range of menial but vital tasks which Italians would consider... _beneath _them." Hilshire considered it impolitic to say "too damn lazy to do."

"Oh, that is undeniably the case, sir, but that very thing is part of the problem." The speaker smoothly replied, calmly deploying an answer that he'd readied earlier. "The presence of these populations is undermining our collective constitution, allowing indolence to seep in and sap our strength." Finding a touchstone to sound off on, he turned from Hilshire to address the wider crowd. "It is part of our social responsibility to remove our undermining dependency on unreliable foreign support. People should be made to work, and companies should stop chasing meaningless additional profit and support their fellow citizens by providing it to them."

As soon as the listeners' latest course of appreciative murmurs faded away, Hilshire sucked in his breath through his teeth, and then smiled sardonically at the speaker. "I don't know... that sounds pretty, well, _socialist_, wouldn't you say?"

But the speaker did not backpedal – sputtering and stammering as he reeled drunkenly from a heavy rhetorical blow, clumsily trying to disentangle himself from the left-wing associations – and Hilshire was instead aghast to discover that instead smiled broadly and swung an arm out in a wide, welcoming embrace.

"Of course, you are perfectly correct. It is indeed socialism, _Herr Kamerad._ National Socialism."

The crowd's rousing cheer bounced the rain back skywards.

* * *

"On my mark! Ready... three, two, one—"

Petrushka's leg pistoned through the door – not just smashing through the rusted lock, but given the old, rotting wood of the thing almost demolishing the entire entrance in a cloud of damp fibres and paint-flakes. An instant later she shoved past the ragged remains of the door and into the empty space beyond, squatted low in a combat posture and her pistol flicking from bearing to bearing in an almost hyperactive blur. Alessandro followed a moment later, his own pistol sweeping broader, slower arcs but still coherently aiming wherever his partner did not.

They effectively menaced a decrepit, empty warehouse. The long, low building was completely bare, the only furniture being clumps of weed pushing up through cracks in the rotting and rutted concrete floor. Walls of aged brick, wet through with damp, crumbled under the weight of a rusted roof of steel spars and corrugated sheets, against which the heavy rain outside clattered and rattled. The atmosphere was muggy and laden, rank with the clayey taste of mildew. It was the very portrait of urban decay, and just as desolate.

Alessandro grunted and holstered his pistol (Petrushka lowered hers but kept it readied in her grasp), and then grabbed his jacket collar to activate his radio bead. "Hallo Zero, this is Bravo One-One. Point six surveyed, no return, over."

"Bravo One-One, Zero responding. Received and understood. No further news. Continue as instructed. Out." His earpiece rasped.

On the second day of the search, a more systematic trawl of the city had been set up by Chief Draghi and his staff. The entirety of the second-generation cyborg unit had been assigned to an industrial sector at the north of the city, which they were gradually chewing through building by brutal building. However, this part of the city was less the rich, thick meat of Milan than the cold, greasy rind – profits had gone down and costs had come up, factories had closed down and businesses had shut up, shutters had rolled down and boards had been nailed up. Whole blocks had been abandoned to dilapidation and dereliction, all dribbling into a turgid soup of grey stone and brown rust swimming in the clouds and rain that had gathered over the night. The only people they encountered were odd tramps, and they knew to make themselves scare when girls with pistols shoved in their belts lithely hand-planted over walls and jumped up to third-storey windows.

Alessandro let go of the communicator and paused for a moment to brush off some of the rain droplets dribbling down his jacket, before shouting across to Petrushka, who had paced off a way to check the corners of the warehouse to make sure that nothing was huddled in a cocoon amongst the dust and cobwebs. "Alright Petra, stow your piece and let's move on to the next one. _Seventh_ time lucky, eh?"

Petrushka walked back over to her partner with a slightly pensive expression marking her features. Alessandro noticed that, but decided to let Petrushka speak about what was troubling her, if she wanted to.

As it happened, she did.

"Everything here just seems so... so... so _sad_, 'Sandro." Petrushka mumbled.

That perturbed Alessandro. Fair enough if everything was boring, or dirty, but _sad_...? The old Elisabeta had spent her early years in the most destitute of Belarus's slums – had a submerged memory been snagged on these sights and dragged up through Petrushka's conditioning to become a surface thought?

"In what way?" Alessandro asked guardedly, with the specific intent of gauging the cyborg's reaction.

Petrushka gnawed her lip, glancing about her uncomfortably, before venturing to speak again. "Everything's _empty_. It just seems so useless. Wouldn't you want to _fill_ these places, bring back sound and light. They must have done it before, otherwise they wouldn't have built these places – so why not now?"

The performer's drive, to make the biggest scene on the biggest stage... Alessandro permitted himself to relax, reassured that Petrushka wasn't giving voice to any deep-seated insecurity. What she _was _betraying was a lack of attentiveness in her history and economics tutorials, but he could work with that!

The crack of flint and the hiss of flame brought a brief star of orange into being, twinkling in the room. "Here's some sound, light, and smell as well." Alessandro smiled as he lifted up the lit cigarette to his mouth.

Petrushka masked a chuckle with a smile and walked over to light one of her own from Alessandro's. They both spent a moment puffing quietly.

"We shouldn't be taking a break now." Petrushka chided herself.

"Eh, we're casing the joint." Alessandro reassured her. "People move – Dona could wander back _in _to our sight just as easily as she's moved _out _of it, but we'd never know if we just give barely a second's glance at everything."

Alessandro glanced upward as he heard the sound of another splatter of rainwater leak through the rusting roof. The next building was several hundred yards away across wasteland and he'd also like to delay getting drenched, if he could help it.

"You know," he began, crushing the remains of his cigarette into the floor, "They actually are trying to restore these places. The government's planning a big regeneration initiative – new buildings, new houses, new business, new work – all bright and clean and neat as a new pin."

Petrushka nodded appreciatively for a moment, and then puzzlement crossed her face. "But if that's the case, why is Padania so strong here? Why would the citizens want to push away help?"

"Well, that's just the trick. Milan's always been one of the wealthiest cities in Europe – if it was a country in its own right, it'd be around about the twenty-fifth richest on the planet." Alessandro said knowledgeably, pulling a helpful titbit from the well-thumbed copy of the _CIA World Factbook_ – or _Bluffer's Guide to International Politics_ – which was back in his apartment. "So why do we have this dilapidation here, of all places?"

"Disparity" Petrushka said suddenly.

That threw Alessandro for a moment – he wasn't used to being interrupted while he was in full flow. "To a degree," he conceded, "but a Padanian would say that the main culprit is the government itself – the Italian state taxes the city's wealth, and then initiatives like this offer a portion of it back and try to condition a sense of deference and gratitude from it. In effect, they're bribing the citizens with _their own money_." Alessandro shook his head in amazement at the naked audacity of it. "Stroke of genius, really."

* * *

"More bad news I'm afraid, Lorenzo." Draghi's voice sounded genuinely apologetic, over the 'phone.

"Hit me, Draghi, I've learned to roll with the blows." Lorenzo sighed resignedly.

"I've had to pull a pair of my Section One crew from the search. They were inspecting an alleyway and got set upon."

Lorenzo ground his teeth. "Are they hurt? Padanians?"

"No, just some pleb mugger with a flick-knife who thought he'd have a go. The useless little scavvy bootscrape went down with one punch! However, a bystander saw them and the nosy prat swelled with such civic virtue that he had to call the local scum." Lorenzo wondered if Draghi was really joking when he referred to the police so disparagingly. "My two had to give their Finance Guard cover – it avoided questions about what they were doing poking about in the garbage, but they've been compromised. I'm moving a reserve unit in, but cover in Zone Six will be low for a while."

"Thanks for the warning, Draghi." Lorenzo grumbled as he began shifting tokens on the map of Milan spread out on his desk.

"No trouble. Inform me if anything happens." Draghi hung up.

Lorenzo paused for a moment as he considered Draghi's closing remark – or parting shot? Draghi had overall field command in Milan – news would be passed to Lorenzo in Rome, not the other way around. So why would "anything coming up" be necessary? His relationship, such as it was, with the Section One chief was rarely warmer than 'antagonistic' (in the tiresomely typical bureaucratic factionalism which Lorenzo ostensibly rejected – yet subconsciously he had already become lost in the rat-race of tit-for-tat one-upmanship) but for this operation Draghi had been nothing short of accommodating and helpful. Lorenzo wanted to believe that his opposite number was putting aside office politics and entering into a spirit of co-operation, but with a self-important signing-off like that he regretted that Draghi was rather relishing in an opportunity to flex his muscles and strut his stuff to the Director and the Defence Minister.

The 'phone rang again, a flickering LED identifying it as an internal call this time.

"Chief? It's Donato. Can you come over to the hospital? There's something that I think you ought to see."

Lorenzo stared at the map. The roads, contours and borders – it was all a plate of congealed spaghetti, and about as appetising.

"On my way."

* * *

With mobile phones becoming ever more widespread it was becoming increasingly difficult to find payphones on the street, but they were not yet extinct and Dona ensconced herself in one – she didn't feel comfortable, as the glass panelling of the booth still left her visible and exposed to enemies, but the muffling effect of the barrier should help conceal her actions from interlopers.

The phone in her room back at the Agency had a long, spiralling cable – like a little cute piggy-tail which just went on and on and on and on – which she liked to play with a wrap and knot around her fingers whenever she was speaking to someone. This payphone's receiver was connected to the console by a length of metal tubing, and scraping a nail along the grooves of the joins between the individual rings of the tube was not nearly so reassuring.

Dona slowly and deliberately dialled a short number.

"Hello, Directory Enquiries, how may I help?"

"I, um... I'd like to make a reverse-charge call?"

"Certainly, ma'am. Can I have your name to inform the recipient who's calling, please?"

"Donatello."

"Beg your pardon, sorry?"

"Donatello."

"Very sorry, ma'am, but I can't hear--?"

"Donatello."

"Oh, I see, you're a boy? Ahaha, my apologies! That's embarrassing, eh? These lines are really terrible. Okay, got it, young sir. Now, what number do you want to connect to?"

"I... I don't know."

"That's alright. Do you have a name or address where I can look it up?"

"It's, uh, it's a place called the, um, Social Welfare Agency, around Rome."

"Oh dear – I'm very sorry, but we can only connect to personal numbers, not public institutions and workplaces. Do you have any other contact that we can use?

"Master Donatello? Hello?"

"No..."

"...is it important that you get in touch with this place?"

"Very..."

"Is there anyone there you have to speak to? Your parents?"

"_I don't _**want**_ any parents_!"

"Wowowowow! Okay, my son, okay! Let me see what I can work out..."

* * *

_Why didn't I just shuffle some paperwork for an hour_? Lorenzo wondered to himself as he gurgled back the bile at seeing Mario's body laid out on a trolley. He was spared the grotesquery of the ragged tunnel of churned bone and twisted gristle that the fatal shot had chewed through Mario's chest, but that was only because Dr. Donato had already _excavated_ most of Mario's torso in the autopsy. With his ribs spread-eagled, Mario's chest was transformed into some gaping, monstrous, mutant _maw_, hungry, _ravenous_, looming ever larger—

"How can you do this?" Lorenzo's composure cracked as he spoke to Donato, who was peeling off a pair of surgical gloves. "I mean, in surgery you're restoring life to people but here, drenched in all this... cold meat..."

"It's not so hard, sir." Donato offered as he began washing his arms. "If anything, it's a break. I can relax – I don't have to sweat over a bad cut sending arterial spray all over the ceiling."

Donato paused as he saw the colour drain from Lorenzo's appalled expression, and then he shrugged. "I'm sorry, sir, but you did ask."

Lorenzo looked back down to Mario, willing himself to accord the handler, who despite everything had died in the line of duty, at least a few seconds' consideration. "Another brick in the wall." He sighed sadly. Names were slowly but steadily filling out the alcoves in the Agency mausoleum. Elsa de Sica, Angelica, Beatrice, Silvia, Marina, Lauro, and a host of Section One agents all swallowed up when probing the lion's mouth... they'd even accorded a place to Pia (although her traitorous handler Earnest had been unceremoniously dumped in a municipal cemetery). Now, Mario would be making that wall even stronger, even harder to break through.

"Why'd you ask me to come here, Donato?" Lorenzo turned his head away quickly.

"Ah, yes, of course." Donato walked over to one of the evidence bins set into the wall of the mortuary, and extracted a large tray on which rested Mario's penetrated ballistic vest – the hole was so neat and perfectly circular you wouldn't imagine the bodily carnage that was wreaked within it – and the crumpled bullet that had done the deed.

"Now," Donato began as he was still walking over to set the tray down on a table, "sadly Mr. Theuma's vest did not help him, but it has helped us – it slowed the round enough for it to be caught in the back-plate on exiting his body, allowing it to be retrieved. And it is... instructive."

Lorenzo had a concern that Dr. Donato was more preoccupied with the mysterious conundrum than the fact that someone had died in order to create that very conundrum, but he decided not to press the issue.

"Firstly, the location of the injury this bullet caused is of interest. Mario was shot in the chest – but not just the chest, the _heart_. Now, it's not uncommon for unskilled snipers to aim for the trunk – I mean, once they've got over pretending to be some elite assassin and trying to do trick-shots off of dinner plates up the target's left nostril. However, a shot not only to the general area of the torso but to the heart specifically speaks of accuracy beyond the novice shooter. Now, this is all speculative – I don't know, maybe the sniper just got lucky, the bullet had to hit somewhere in the chest and the heart is as good a place as any other – but still, such precision in the wrong place strikes me as the product of someone making a _conscious effort _to _appear_ unskilled."

"What, so Padania are trying to conceal that they've hired a top assassin?" Lorenzo wondered.

"Or that they're getting aid _pro bono_." Donato intoned darkly. He walked over to a bookshelf and pulled off a pocket book – _Jane's Gun Recognition Guide_, which still had parts of a high-street bookshop's price tag attached to it_. _He saw Lorenzo's questioning look. "It's still a useful reference sir.

"You see, a lot of the rifles that Padania have been using up to now are just civilian hunting rifles, or Zastavas picked up from the former Yugoslavia." Donato continued, flicking through the book as he did so. "but they're chambered for 12.7 millimetre rounds. Even the old Soviet Dragunov, which is as common as muck these days – meaning no disrespect to dear Rico – uses 7.62. The bullet on that tray, though, is a third-inch magnum round. Not continental, as you may have guessed. In fact," Donato held up one page of the book before Lorenzo, "it's used in particular by the British Army's L96A1 sniper rifle."

Donato fixed on Lorenzo's eyes. "Don't you find that interesting?"

Lorenzo held the doctor's gaze. "Yes. Very interesting indeed."

* * *

"_You conceited little girl! You ungrateful little brat! As worthless as your damned ignorant father! God knows why you keep running to him, except to aggravate me! I slave – slave – to raise you, and what do you do? What? What? WHAT? So damned disobedient! So damned contrary! And you never..._

_...ever..._

_...LISTEN TO ME!"_

* * *

Lorenzo burst into the entrance building – appropriately enough called the Public Front – brandishing and swinging his pager in front of him as though it was a nightstick with which to bash aside any obstacle in his way. He charged straight to the telephone desk.

"Toni, you're telling me that Dona actually _contacted us_?" Even though Lorenzo had sprinted from halfway across the hospital bridge, he wasn't out of breath and was practically roaring at the hapless operator. "How the _Hell_ did you lose that line, you _stupid bint_?"

Toni herself, a young Section One junior cleric transferred across from a nondescript government office, looked both distressed and bewildered, cut adrift in a storm. She worked exclusively in the Public Front and although she'd signed the Secrets Act as usual she'd barely even seen the cyborgs. "I tried, Chief Lorenzo! She came through a reverse-charge line on a public phone. Benito immediately began a trace" – she motioned to another sheepish-looking Section One office figure on a desk across the room. "But as soon as the directory operator mentioned that she was signing off Dona started babbling and crying and apologising for being wrong and breaking security protocols and involving a civilian, and then she hung up." She looked up at Lorenzo with a pathetic expression. "I could barely get a word in." She pleaded plaintively.

Lorenzo removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose in frustration. Maybe he should apologise to the Toni girl for shouting at her, but he decided that a measure of harshness would be important in toughening out someone who was still as green as the fresh spring grass. Instead of responding to Toni, he moved on to a new topic. "Was the trace completed, at least?"

Benito shrugged, consigning everything to cosmic forces. "I'm sorry, sir, it takes time and Dona was only on the line for seconds, she didn't give us enough. We know she was using a payphone, but there could be hundreds of them in Milan. We've nothing specific."

The boy was sorely mistaken if that was a thorough response. Lorenzo lashed both of the operatives with a burning glower. "Well, and what are you two going to _do _about it? You're from Section One, the intelligence wing, so start damned _detecting_ already! Get in touch with that phone company and see if you can find the operator that spoke to Dona! Hurry, now!"

Lorenzo stalked out, leaving behind two other agents who were practically falling over each in alarm.

* * *

Draghi shook his head in quiet amazement when he saw Elenora, one of his agents, lounging up against the side of a public toilet building, of all places. Had it been later in the evening she'd have been accosted as a cheap streetwalker. After their repeated communications insistently pulled their _commander_ out from his position at the command vehicle, she certainly had all of the tact and elegance of one in Draghi's mind now.

"Make it snappy, Miss. Gabrielli, my time's limited."

Elenora bowed her head in deferential acknowledgement to Draghi. "I'm sorry again, sir, but it's actually my partner who wants to speak with you..."

At that moment Pietro, the very man, emerged from the men's toilets, wiping his hands with a coarse green paper towel before scrunching it up and tossing it into a dustbin beside the door. "Three points." He smiled.

"I really hope that I'm not keeping you, Mr. Fermi." Draghi hissed testily.

Pietro also nodded to his superior. "Beg your pardon, sir, but you had me and Elenora trudging through the sewers this morning, and walking across town covered from head to toe in shit wouldn't really help us keep cover. We decided to clean up beforehand."

Draghi grunted. "Be grateful I had you two do it today, when there's a water-flow to keep everything clean." He turned around, motioning the other two Section One agents to follow him as he did so. "Come. Talk as I walk. I need to get back to the command vehicle as soon as I can."

Pietro stepped up to a faster pace so that he could be alongside the section commander. "Chief, if I may, the report of the phone call that was sent down to us earlier today has made me think."

"About what, Mr. Fermi?"

Pietro sucked in his breath through his teeth as he mustered the will to speak. He was never the person to show the most regard for decorum and tact, but even despite his lack of social graces he could tell that he was stepping out of line here, and Draghi would not like it one bit.

"Sir, I think that you're conducting the search in the wrong way."

"And what vantage gives you the necessary broad perspective to make such an observation, Mr. Fermi?" Draghi clenched his jaw and stared straight ahead.

"Well, sir, I don't have kids myself but my brother has spread his oats and my sister has dropped a whole clutch of sprogs. Altogether my nephews and nieces are a pretty active lot, keen on exploring, adventuring, kiddy stuff." Pietro related.

"Get to the point, Fermi." Draghi growled. Pietro noticed that he'd dropped the "Mr."

"Sometimes they also go running off because they're angry after a row, or because they don't want to get caught after doing something naughty. They always come back, though, because the loneliness is always stronger than the hate or the fear – and if they lose their way in the supermarket, they know to make their way to the information desk."

Despite himself, Draghi's head twitched towards Pietro. "A cyborg is far removed from an ordinary girl, Fermi, I think that the link that you're drawing is pretty tenuous."

"They're not so different as _we _might think, sir." Elenora interjected, adjusting the pronoun in a more conciliatory gesture than her partner could manage, and remembering her conversation with Henrietta back in the girl's bedroom in Sicily. It was almost two years since that event now, and it was still clearly impressed in her mind.

Pietro continued. "We've been treating Dona as though she's an escaped prisoner or a mark who's gone to ground. We've been rooting through hiding places, looking under rocks – when all the time she's been sitting on top of them. You're treating the cyborg as an enemy, and whatever you may think, sir, she's _not_. We're on the same side – why should she conceal herself?"

Pietro could see Draghi bristling. Why indeed.

"The fact is, sir, she's not _hiding _from us. She's a frightened, lonely girl, and she's _lost_."

"Are you suggesting an alternative course of action, Mr. Fermi?" Draghi asked icily.

"Well, sir, when you're looking for something, under your nose is always a good place to start." Pietro shrugged non-commitantly.

Draghi pinched his nose instinctively. He was quiet for a while.

"You always had a mouth, Fermi." He managed humourlessly.

"A dirty mind, sir – but that means that digging things up can't make it any worse."

* * *

The rain had finally expended itself, but the sky still remained grey. Dona wondered if you could blow it up, or burn it away. That was how she usually solved problems, like that time she hiked up the Apennines with a MILAN missile launcher strapped to her back and had taken out a whole chalet full of the enemy from the communist terrorising 'vigilante' Popular Response Force (Mario had said that there was something ironic about the acronym), wiping out in a couple of shots what half-a-dozen fratelli were painstakingly manoeuvring towards.

That had been great.

Thinking about MILANs.

In Milan.

Milans in Milan.

Punny.

Funny.

Good to laugh.

Fun.

Fun's funny.

Ha-ha.

Dona began to laugh. It was not a happy, gay, bouncing tinkle of sound, but a mutant, swollen, distorted growl, a wet tumescence in her throat dribbling out in breaths – a staccato bark of a machine-gun, with the reports having to fight up through phlegm. She was shaking.

"Are you retarded?"

Dona froze and looked up. There was a group of five young children – all around her age, and probably taking advantage of the break in the weather to get outside after being cooped up all day – with one holding a football, standing and staring at her blankly.

Dona blinked. "Um, I don't think so?"

The leading child tipped his head to one side and stared at her in a way that he probably thought was as inquisitive as Detective Aurelio Zen, but which actually made him look as though he had some sort of squint. Dona giggled, naturally this time.

The boy shook his head. "Weird. But that's okay." He thrust the football in his hands forward towards Dona. "Wanna play? We need one more to make it even on each side."

"Sure." Dona found herself standing up off of the roundabout she had been sitting on and stepping forward into the playground that she had entered.

The children immediately sparked off into an impromptu football game. It was a silly, spontaneous affair, with the field stretching across the entire playground, the bars of jungle gyms being used as goalposts, heated arguments over whether throw-ins had to be taken at the playground fence or behind it, and with the all the other playground furniture there just to bounce off and make it a lot more interesting than the prissy dandies on the television who dove whenever there was a featherstroke ten yards away.

The ball rolled to Dona, and she fixed on it with an expression of delight. She drew her leg back, kicked it—

--and sent it flying over the rooftops.

"That went _miles_!" One breathed wondrously.

"That was _cool_!" One cried excitedly.

"That was _my ball_!" One shouted indignantly.

Dona went crimson with embarrassment, gnawing at her knuckles. She'd gotten so carried away, her strength had rolled along with her. "I'm sorry!" she squeaked.

Then her eyes lost focus, and the rosy red drained from her cheeks to form a dry bed of pale white. She turned her head towards the boy who'd given her the football.

"I'm sorry."

She began walking up to him.

"I'm sorry."

"So you should be! It's probably stuck on some roof and I'll never get it back—"

Dona punched the boy. He immediately fell backwards onto the ground and lay still. Dona fell onto her knees, straddling him, and continued punching.

The boys thought that it was a real hoot at first, their leader getting duffed up by a girl. Then they looked at the boy, and started to squirm. One walked up to Dona.

"Hey, stop—"

A backhanded slap sent him spinning into the swings, clutching his arm and wailing piteously.

A girl tried to grab at Dona's dress, clutching and yanking at the fabric with little hands, spreading brown splotches of dirt from where she'd been picking up the ball in the wet muddy grass at the verges of the playground.

"Stop it! Stop it! You're hurting him—"

She bounced off of the clay ground and gashed her head bloodily against the edge of the slide. She lay beneath it, her legs and arms flapping weakly.

The other children shrieked, wailed, cried, and fled.

Dona turned her head back down and continued with her work. All the time, mouthing silently.

_imsorry imsorry imsorry imsorry imsorry imsorry imsorry imsorry imsorry imsorry imsorry imsorry..._

* * *

"Excuse me sir – National Police, we're investigating a disappearance. Is there any chance of you remembering seeing this girl either today or yesterday?"

Priscilla placed Dona's photograph underneath what must have been the twentieth employee of Milan's Central Station. The haggard-looking man simply shook his head mutely (that said, his eyelids were drooping so much Priscilla could have placed a winning lottery ticket in his face and he'd have assumed that it was a handkerchief to blow his nose on) and swung away to herd another gaggle of passengers onto a late train.

Priscilla frowned and turned away, only to almost be jostled off the platform by another passenger whose rush would be stemmed by no uniform. As tempting as it was, she didn't take advantage of her disguise to try and accost the inconsiderate man, though, instead settling for a philosophical sigh and scratching the starchy, irritating collar of her uniform – pulled straight from the Agency storage and which she had had to spend ten minutes brushing the mothballs off of before she could even put it on. Hundreds of thousands of passengers passed through the station every day – even now, in late evening when the sun had already fallen, the place was still heaving; clanking stock, clapping feet, braying tannoys, and waves of talk churned together into a deafening roar and the tight press of bodies crushed out the viscous, muggy, salty wave of befuddling, hazy heat. The idea that Dona had already left Milan and had started making her own way to Rome was something of a longshot to say the least, and given the environment – where a beleaguered travellers squeezed between each other, eyes glaring narrowly at the gum-stained ground below them rather than wondering openly at the stunning high vaults above them – the further idea of actually verifying it seemed all but impossible.

Priscilla pushed up her head and saw Amadeo, also dressed in a National Police uniform, wading over to her. She wondered exactly why the two had been partnered – perhaps because she called herself "the fallen angel of love" and Amadeo strutted as "the agent of love", the powers that be thought that they would be a natural fit, as one jigsaw piece had a part sticking out while the other hard a space missing. This was leaving out the small but pertinent fact of Amadeo's woeful moves which he thought were suave and seductive but were really clumsy at best and boorish at worst; while Priscilla wasn't the sort of woman who haughtily rebuffed all interest and was certainly open to being teased and beguiled, the fact of the matter simply was that Amadeo himself achieved neither.

Still, that was one of the upshots of the Central Station, and the task that the Agency had been lumbered with – Amadeo was as beleaguered as Priscilla was, and neither had the form or energy necessary to flirt with so much as a lifestyle magazine.

After extricating himself from the latest knot of late-night passengers, Amadeo finally managed to pull up in front of Priscilla. "I've been over the camera feeds with the face-spotter program," he explained, holding up a nondescript computer memory-stick, "and it came up with precisely diddly-squat. No dice, I'm afraid." He looked around him in exasperation. "We really need Claes here – with her eyes we could put a dozen real feeds in fast-forward alongside each other and she could still spot Dona through a disguise."

Priscilla shrugged as the two turned back in the direction of the faint relief, a flow of air, which indicated the direction of the exit. "Well, whatever the case, we're the ones who are here now. God commands, we can but follow..." her voice trailed off as her head started swivelling, tracking a moving target.

"What? You see something?" Amaedo followed Priscilla's gaze, furrowing his brows in confusion when he saw that his partner was looking not at an adolescent girl but an elderly man with a newspaper tucked under his arm.

"Something definitely..." Priscilla mused, before suddenly making off in the direction of the shopping booths at the edge of the station, elbowing aside travellers in her way. "Wait here!" She called back.

Her companion was left bewildered for a moment, before Priscilla came back – her face wet with dismay.

She held up an evening final of the local edition of the _Il Giorno_.

The headline read:

**SCUFFLE BECOMES SERIOUS**

_Playground rough-housing leads to one death and two injuries – tragic accident or uncontrollable tearaways?_

Amadeo tapped his teeth with the memory stick thoughtfully.

"Shit." He decided.

* * *

(Continued)


	4. Chapter 4 Sunday

"_They see me rollin', they hatin', patrollin', tryin' catch me ridin' dirty..."_

Kara's eyebrow twitched. She quickly turned off the radio.

In order to take her mind from the vulgar music, She remembered reading a book once, an old one from Claes's library. It had complained about poor posture, and how all of society's ills could be traced to the assumptions of personal worth that were inherent in a bent spine and shuffling gait.

People were certainly shifting up their heads to stare at Kara as she purred down the road in a Ferrari 599 GTB, its pristine bodywork gleaming like a gem in its newness. She didn't think that the author of the book would be too pleased, though – he had been anticipating that the Italy would be marching in step and leading their phalanxes in war and conquest and proving their manliness and forging their greatness as a nation in the furnace of bloody triumph, not ogling the latest smooth-curved sample of conspicuous consumption.

Still, it suited Kara's purpose – all those vacant faces, turned towards her. It made the crowd that much easier to scan for desperate little girls.

And, she had to admit to herself with a wry smile, she didn't mind the attention.

* * *

The sun had come out, and it was too bright.

The temperature had warmed, and it was too hot.

The city was waking, and it was too loud.

The church bells rang, and they made her skull quiver and batter her brain.

Her clothes had dried out, and her skin crawled, every hair tangling on every fibre.

Walls were painted, clothes were patterned; the colours bloomed out or bled over each other.

People looked at her, and it made her ears throat dry.

She licked her lips, and drowned in her own spit.

Sound flooded.

Silence screamed.

Wind burned.

Light chilled.

Sensation swept over her. Sensitivity sparked off her nails, scampered on her arms, struck her temples slithered under her eyelids, seized her chest.

The world was underfoot, and it was too heavy to walk on.

So Dona stopped.

* * *

Rico liked being in the helicopter. There was a great breeze when the door was open.

The helicopter banked again, and Rico felt her seatbelt take the strain as she hung in space above the city. It wasn't thrilling so much as fulfilling, in a dreamlike way, as though she was floating above the world... and with her scope against her eye, she could see anything in it.

In the front compartment, the pilot quickly turned his head to glance out of the window behind him – as though checking to make sure that there was no eavesdropper clinging to the fuselage with a cheeky Dictaphone like a scurrilous muckraker for a scandal mag – and then leant close into Jean to whisper conspiratorially.

Even though they were communicating through headsets and anyone in the craft would have heard it clearly.

"I don't like this gig anymore." The pilot muttered, after making his ritual of close confidence. "Don't you remember that police chopper in Venice during St. Marks, or the two cargo-carriers for the ski resorts in Piedmont? Padania have missiles now!"

"Shut up and fly." Jean growled.

Then something shot through the noise of the rotors

"Bang!" Rico had suddenly cried excitedly.

Dona had lain down to die – and now the buzzards were circling overhead.

* * *

Another car – this time, an innocuous saloon – drove around the broad square of wasteland. Several blocks of urban terraces had been demolished years ago, a whole neighbourhood which had been built up and bonded together other generations suddenly uprooted and torn apart, removed from friends and relatives and scattered across the city with the promises that they would be reunited – reborn – in a fresh, new, modern redevelopment. It never happened, of course – maybe the company ran out of money, or the sponsoring politician lost an election. Whatever – it had never happened, and the empty square, now given over to a bed of weed, was laid out as a testament to the insincerity of higher powers and _governments_, whose patsies would promise the Earth only to deliver the ashes. The mute emptiness of the wasteland was entirely appropriate for a meaning that was self-evident. The foulness of the state needed no explanation.

Except now, the square wasn't as empty as usual. Thieri squinted hard through the car window as he turned the saloon around another corner. The grass was just beginning the process of dying back as the weather cooled, and in between the drooping stalks emerged a flash of clothing.

"Well, there it is." Thieri turned his head back to the four other occupants of the car, whose hands lay lightly on pistols and Uzis and who were all looking out warily. "Are we ready for the snatch?"

"I still don't like it." One of the other Padanians piped up, his look of consternation deepening into an angry scowl. "We should just kill the bitch."

"Damnit, haven't we gone over this enough already?" Thieri growled testily. "How often do we have a chance to get this _close_ to one of these monstrosities? Remember all that we invested in _Earnest_?"

"Yeah, and how much that poster-boy and his doll _cost_ us too, and all for nothing in the end." The other man remained surly and unconvinced. "One of my cousins was killed by an Agency assassin while trying to cover his ass in Termini Station. I say that we cut our losses, and cut _it_ up into joints."

There was a murmur of agreement across the car. Thieri bit back a curse. Did they think that he didn't know the dangers? Didn't _they_ know that they were _adding_ to them? Delay only made them more exposed, and he didn't want to waste even more vital time cajoling them into action.

"Look, what will that get us? The Agency's got a whole _production line_ of these things. Kill one, they'll pluck some other poor sap out of an orphanage and turn her into the Bionic Woman. But if we _capture _it... there's a half-a-dozen doctors in the city hospital who can get to work on the thing with a can opener, and all that technology inside will be _Padania's._ It's still going to _die_, we're just going to be able to wring some _profit_ out of it first, for the good of the _cause_."

"If it's so damn valuable, why isn't the boss here to oversee it himself?" A second Padanian added his own voice of dissent. "Selling off a bucket of scrap isn't going to be much use to me when we're dead, is it? These creatures are too damn dangerous! We've got the weapons, let's just pump it full of holes and have done with it. It's already _killed_ seven fellow Padanians..."

Thieri decided to appeal to their baser instincts and prejudices. "_Fellow Padanians?_" He snorted derisively, making sure that the contempt was practically dripping from his nostrils. "Those twats who got minced on Friday were Albanian heavies, hired muscle. Immigrants – not an ounce of Lombardy in their pudgy little gobs. Worse – they may be white, but those Mohammedan fuckwits are no better than wogs!" A fleck of spittle hit the windshield in front of him – he was proud of that bit of stagecraft. "Let the Agency put down as many of them as it likes, we can make the scroungers good for _something_ at least."

"Yeah, well, we don't _have_ a bunch of wogs throwing themselves forward to be our cannon fodder _this_ time, _do we_?" A voice piped up from the back. "I don't want to give the government shits the satisfaction of a _free kill_ on _me_ just because someone wants a trophy for the mantelpiece." He said pointedly.

"_Don't fuck with the Agency_." All four other occupants of the car intoned the same sage, wise, and insightful aphorism in perfect unison. _"Just be where they're not._"

Thieri gritted his teeth in exasperation. He tapped the steering wheel while considering his response – and then decided that actions spoke louder than words.

The other Padanians gave a collective cry of alarm as Thieri abruptly swung the car over onto the wasteland, everyone jumping in their seats as the vehicle juddered over the broken, uneven ground.

"The boss might not be here but I, your _cell commander_, am!" Thieri shouted over the din of the car scraping the chassis on the stones of the wasteland. "And _I'm_ willing to put myself on the line for this! _I _will come out with Pietro and Ponzio to grab the machine. Quirino will take the wheel and keep the engine running, and Raffaelle can move into the front passenger seat to keep a lookout. We're not limp women who will squeal at effort – we're _men_, and we can _do this_!"

Thieri braked the car and leapt out. The other Padanians glanced at each other uncertainly – but someone would need to get out of the car to move to the driver's seat anyway, and as they did, they found the feet following Thieri's instructions.

All the while, Dona lay on the ground, eyes closed beneath a clear sky.

* * *

"Need a coffee." Avise looked down and pleaded through the pavement. He'd pounded the streets of Nasiriyah; almost physically baked inside an APC in the searing desert heat; patrolled down dusty streets where eyes – hundreds of eyes – beat on him with a black malevolence as close and as choking as the tinder-dry air; tried to blink through the stupefying fog of humidity down by the riverbank; and heard the reeds snap and rustle not from the wind, but from the gunfire slashing through them.

He blinked away the sleep from his eyes and swore that trotting down a high street in Italy was ten times harder.

"It's alright, Mr. Mancini, things'll work out today, just you see." Agapita beamed happily beside him.

Even if her words seemed simpering and sanguine, the sunny smile lifted Avise's spirits – there, at least, was one thing that you never found in Iraq.

"Well, I'm heartened by your confidence, Agapita." Avise said as he scanned the pavement – still busy even though it was a Sunday – ahead of him, in the faint hope that Dona would suddenly appear clutching a passer-by's leg.

"No, not confidence – _certainty_." Agapita strutted a momentary pose, her long, loose skirt snapping about her shins she did so. "It's been three days!"

"So? What's so special about that? If anything, it means that Dona's further away than ever." Avise was genuinely baffled.

Agapita looked appalled, as though anything slipping by her mentor and master was nothing short of scandal. "Three days!" She insisted. "Christ rose in three days!"

Avise...

...well, that threw him for a loop.

"_And _it's a Sunday today, too!" Agapita's trust in the portents of Providence was evidently absolute.

Avise narrowed his eyes at Agapita – was she making some sort of sarcastic joke? But she held his gaze with a clean, completely guileless smile.

He wasn't sure whether or not to bop her on the head for vaguely sacrilegious and improbable foolishness, or embrace her right then and there for her unsullied honest innocence when most other teenagers at her age would have ground out their hopes and spirit with turgid angst and cynicism.

In the end Avise settled for patting Agapita's shoulder. She was a precious young thing, wasn't she?

The fratello reached the end of their street and the end of their run, and their path converged with Hilshire and Triela coming the other way. It only the emphasised the disparity between the two classes – with grey, sunken eyes and crumpled clothing, Avise and Hilshire could do little to disguise the haggard fatigue of three days on their feet. By contrast, both of the cyborgs looked pristine, having the uncanny female ability to preen and groom anywhere – or the doll's nature of being trapped in the same state.

The handlers greeted each other with a nod and a shared look of strained understanding. Agapita stepped forward excitedly when she noticed Triela – but then quickly checked her pace. The face of the normally-ebullient second-generation girl finally fell when Triela pointedly absorbed herself in the pigeons perched on the windowsills of the building above them, instead of giving any attention to her sister-cyborg.

"You head north now, and I move south." Hilshire kept things businesslike.

"In-out-in-out-shake-it-all-about, you do the hokey-cokey and you turn around..." Avise muttered ruefully.

Hilshire was about to chide Avise for his flippant manner – he would have expected more discipline from a soldier, three days on the go or not – but he was interrupted as the beads in both of the handlers' ears squawked. "_Silence_, all stations! This is Zero! _Contact! We have located Dona!"_

Agency staff all over Milan abruptly paused and stared at their companions with stark expressions which blew through all fatigue and frustration. The announcement continued:

"Dona has been sighted from air in a wasteland area in Zone Eight, Survey Section Two. Particular co-ordinates are being transmitted to your PDAs now! Any unit in closest proximity, respond immediately!"

Avise quickly flipped his palmtop computer down from where he'd stored it up his sleeve, and blinked. "Jesus Christ, that's _us_! We're in Eight-Three!"

Hilshire gripped his jacket collar and barked into his radio bead. "Hallo Zero, this is Alpha Two-One! Responding! Out!"

Avise seemed nonplussed at not being the first out of the starting block, but wasn't going to argue such a petty point of pride given the urgency of the situation. "Zero, Bravo Six-One! Also responding! Out!"

While Avise was relaying his own confirmation, Hilshire turned to the cyborgs. "Get there! Secure her! We'll come with a car soon!" Teutonic terseness did have advantages in uncomplicated, snappy orders.

Triela nodded and was immediately gone, her pigtails snapping behind her as she rushed through the crowd. Giving her a last wistful glance – plunging into danger, plummeting further still down the hole that he had dug for her – Hilshire turned back to his fellow handler. "How are we for transport?"

Avise was already consulting his PDA. "Section One parked a car near here on Saturday – our multikeys will work on it. Let's head for that."

Not inclined to waste time with words, Hilshire nodded his assent and the two moved off, making their way as best they could through the dense crowds and trying not to demean themselves too much in comparison to the lithe agility that the cyborgs had shown...

...Or cyborg, singular. Avise stumbled to a stop when he suddenly noticed that Agapita was still jogging alongside him.

"Damn it, Agapita, what the Hell are you still here for? Get after Triela!" Avise snarled angrily. "And _help_ her!"

Agapita visibly blanched at the rebuke and swayed back as though she'd been physically struck, her eyes wide in terror of her master's displeasure. Quickly she blinked back to awareness, though, as the specific order had set down rails along which she could roll. She nodded an acknowledgement and sped off after her sister-cyborg.

Avise grimaced as he turned back to Hilshire, whose feet were already hopping from one to another in impatience to be moving again.

"Two months since she was activated and she still lacks initiative." Avise shook his head. Agapita could respond to a specific order with precision and dedication, but she could never seem to follow up on them. It wasn't so much a lack of _wit _– she was perfectly aware in other respects – but it was as if a program terminated at the end-line without a "GOTO 10" to start again. Throughout an operation Agapita needed to have her hand held with closely-supervised orders; normally Avise wouldn't have minded, appreciating the close contact, but sometimes an officer expected to be able to delegate.

Hilshire wasn't much in the mood for ruminating on Care For The Common Cyborg. "You can cook up a whole new conditioning brew with Jean later, if you must - But _we_ need to go, _now!_"

* * *

Agapita caught up quickly with Triela – maybe she didn't have the sheer strength of a first-generation cyborg, but longer legs certainly helped to make up for it. The streets that they were running down were nothing short of packed, dense with crowds and thrumming with traffic even on a Sunday afternoon, but it presented no obstacle to either of them. Slight frames slid between bodies; nimble feet danced around prams and trolleys; tense arms swung around and lobbed off of lampposts; and even if it provoked a few shouts of anger at the insolence of young tearaways, they could bounce onto and trampoline off of car bonnets to heel around tight knots of people, both scudding over the human stream like knife-keeled yachts. Agility that could leap between roofs and outpace lifelong athletes; dexterity that could conduct a battle as ballet and weave a ribbon around a bullet – the shouting, screaming, cursing, crying, grumbling, groaning press of common, sweating, stinking humanity was as insubstantial as mist and streamed past the two cyborgs as quietly as dust.

The grand city buildings gave way to postwar brick and concrete, and from there to shabby urban terraces, before falling away entirely to a broad, empty square of rubble and wiry, cutting crass, over a hundred yards wide, surrounded on three sides by terraces with the fourth ending in the lip of a steep levee leading down to a small canal.

The first the Padanians knew of the oncoming cyborgs was when the report of a single bullet from Agapita's pistol, already sped past their unaware ears and gone, echoed back off of the buildings at them. They looked up, startled, heads bobbing every way to see the source of a threat which had rebounded from every angle.

A warning shot?

The two cyborgs, kicking up wakes of churned-up dirt as they sprinted across the wasteland, with Agapita gripping her pistol in both hands and Triela throwing down her bag to reveal her shotgun, made their intent clear enough.

_A starter's pistol._

The Padanians opened up first, with one of the car occupants bracing himself against a window-frame to drench Triela in Uzi-fire. However, he'd aimed low in the mistaken anticipation of the cyborg going to ground, so the shots only blew up a cloud of dirt in front of her, although ricochets nicked her thighs and smacked hard against a shin.

Only affording the injury a grunt and not even checking her pace, Triela chambered her first cartridge. "Okay, first blood to Padania," she bared her teeth in a snarl, "and that's _all_ you're getting".

Her arm moving as a blur as she pumped the shotgun's slide, Triela fired four blasts at almost a machine-gun rate. The men in the car screamed far beyond the range of any human sound, their voices swept into the distended shriek of rent metal as the interior of their vehicle became a thrashing, churning grinder of glass, steel, and slick gristle.

One of the Padanians on foot swung round to draw a bead on the charging figure of Agapita before she could throw herself down and settle into a proper firing position. However, in his ignorance he also failed to appreciate that for a cyborg's firm joints and computed co-ordination, firing on the move was no difficulty – a flurry of shots from Agapita's Tanfoglio pistol had torn up the Padanian before he'd even finished aiming.

The two remaining Padanians continued to dash forward even as the blood from their last companion spattered across their backs and heels. They both almost threw themselves on top of the inert cyborg, and then came up with her, the limp body hanging slack while the men each had an arm around one of her armpits.

Triela skidded to a halt, holding her shotgun across her chest in a guard position.

Thieri summoned a breath.

"Let's talk."

"...OK. What about?"

Thieri shifted his fingers in his gun-hand, the metal suddenly feeling very slick, slippery and insecure. The Agency wasn't so much an institution or an entity as a _force_ – impersonal, implacable, something you only knew by its _effects_ – effects which were as fatal and inevitable as nature itself. And yet here he was... _talking_ – talking! _TALKING!_ – to one of... one of **Them**. It felt as though he was physically holding back a hurricane, or pinning together the fissures of an earthquake, and the surreal, demented power of the situation made him laugh despite himself.

"What's the joke?"

"Not one you'd get." Seeing Triela start to shift her grip on her weapon in response to the dismissive remark, Thieri hurriedly set out his case. "Look, Action Girl, we can work this out. We're just footsoldiers—"

Now it was Triela's turn to giggle. "You'd need to actually have an army, first."

Thieri sensed his companion tense and mutter "...little brown bitch..." under his breath. Thieri hissed at him to keep quiet out of the corner of his mouth – he hated the impudent girl as much as anyone but now wasn't the time. He then called out aloud again, "Soldiers, gangsters, thugs, whatever. Fact is, we're no-one important. We know you're not here for us, you're here" – he shook Dona in his grasp – "for _this_. And we have it."

"Not for long." Triela smirked. "She must weigh the worse part of two hundred pounds. How long will it be until you get a dead arm and drop her?"

"How long can you wave about that _dildo_ of yours in broad daylightuntil someone notices and calls the police?"

"Point." Triela mused for a moment, before levelling her shotgun at the two Padanians. "Envious?"

Thieri hissed in his next breath. Had she even _moved_? One instant she was pointing her weapon at the sky, and then...! "Look, sorry, I don't mean to offend your ladylike sensibility" he said hurriedly, "and I'm not interested in a pissing contest. Miss. Pistol who's trying to circle behind us should know that she can't shoot because my friend will empty half his Uzi into this one's neck if she takes one more step" – Agapita, who had been doing just that, suddenly froze still – "and _you_ can't use your shotgun because the spread will hit this thing, as well as us. So, you two stay here; let us carry this one to the building line; we drop it and run the moment we're out of sight. We know you lot are quick – we _can't _double-cross you, we couldn't get away in time with the weight of carrying it. You get it, we get away, _everyone _wins. How about it?"

It was a good deal, both the Padanians knew it...

...And their eyes widened in disbelief when Triela's response was to rack her shotgun's slide. "Guys, guys... she's a _cyborg._" Triela paused to toss her head and move a stray strand of pigtail away. "I think that she can take it."

Thieri's clammy grip on his pistol suddenly froze into ice, cementing it solidly in his hand. His rasping breath burst into a full roar as he raised the weapon. "_YOU FUCKING CUNT!"_

A boom doubly re-echoed across the wasteland. It drowned out two screams; the ripples of its fading rumble melted down the two popping cracks as the two cyborgs jogged over to the splayed bodies and Agapita finished the job off with her pistol.

What it did not conceal, however, was the discordant wail of a police siren.

Triela was still disentangling Dona from the bodies of the Padanians – Agapita whirled around to confront a policewoman leaping out a patrol car that had just ground up onto the wasteland, a service revolver in her own hand. It was almost ridiculous – the woman was goggle-eyed in panic, sweating profusely and barely coherent as she ranted about murder and arrests and silence – but through either some intoxicating hope for glory or some consuming commitment to duty she continued to lurch forward, and the revolver in her grip was dangerous enough.

The policewoman may have been driven by duty, but Agapita also had hers. She said "I'm sorry", raised her pistol—

--and flicked on the safety.

Agapita blinked uncomprehendingly, only just realising what she'd done. That wasn't right. She was supposed to kill—

--but was she?

Avise's order pounded in Agapita's head like the pulses of a migraine. _Help Triela! Help Triela! Help Triela! _It burst in her head every time her quivering thumb came down on the pistol's safety-catch, like a contact completing a circuit. But then a roaring surge would spume out and up and over and drown it, as the core indoctrinations rushed up in full force.

_Except where specifically ordered by your handler, figures of official public authority are not to be harmed_.

_Not to be harmed! _

_Not to be harmed!_

It wouldn't even let her wound the assailant, or scare her with a near-miss! The winding impact of such a mental blow would shove her thumb from the catch, but as it died back the insistent migraine would emerge again.

_Help Harmed Not Public Triela Help Except Harmed Be Authority Help Not Official!_

So Agapita quaked between two states, smacked away from one decision to bounce back off of another. Her mind staggered down as noise bawled over her head, as the policewoman was shouting and Triela was shouting and Avise was shouting and some fat old guy was shouting and she couldn't make anything out as they yelled over each other and everything was so loud and so hot and she didn't know what to do—

The bullet smashed into Agapita's skull with an audible crunch of splintering ceramite and span off into the undergrowth, ripping away her beret and soggy flap of flesh and hair with it. It was almost with gratitude that she toppled backwards into the dirt.

The policewoman was frozen into her stance, and only unfolded from it in juddering jerks with each heated pant of breath. Despite herself, a rush of exhilaration swept over her, flooding emotion whirling from toe to top with such speed that she became giddy with the thrill of vertigo. Hahah! What was that joke about the Carabineri? _Penguins_ be damned! She'd just – she'd just _faced down _a _shooter_! A shooter threatening people with a _gun_! And she'd stopped that! She was a _heroine—_

Her bold hand vanished as a bullet swatted away her pistol's trigger, and her forefinger along with it. The props of her newfound stature were knocked away as two more shots blew out her kneecaps. The world cartwheeled around her – wildly, crazily – but it ended with a winding slam to the ground. Her body rolled until her head was facing the sky – it was as much the glare from the light as the tears from the pain that blurred her vision.

A shadow passed over her. She couldn't make out the face of the figure with its back to the sun, but in one of life's little ironies its blonde hair shone like a halo in the light, suffused with such incredible radiance that energy cascaded in two streams from her head.

Triela shook her head sadly, even as she aimed her pistol at the policewoman's head. "I'm sorry."

* * *

Eyes stared at Seamus – not in shock, not in incomprehension, but _accusation_. "You... shot me in the back... you fucking coward."

Seamus took a step forward. The bare, musty floorboards creaked underneath him. The other man was still trying to clutch at his rifle, but his grip kept slipping, as though he had the energy to close his fingers around the stock and barrel but not hold them in place, so that when he lifted it just slithered out and fell into his lap again, slumped beneath the windowsill. Seamus curled his lip in contempt. He kept his pistol trained on the sniper, but afforded a demonstrative twitch of the thick, silenced barrel towards the rifle. "Really. How long has it been since you stood toe to toe with a man?"

The sniper smiled, the opening of his lips letting blood drain through his teeth. "Three years. Mexico drugs. Gutted... one of you Fenians... like a fish." He hacked wetly.

Seamus narrowed his eyes.

Suddenly energy surged through the sniper. Slack limbs tensed; he pushed forward against the wall. Seamus fired instinctively, but the shift in the sniper's position meant that the bullet only popped a dimple in the wall near his enemy's shoulder. The sniper threw himself forward, snatched a boot knife from his trouser, ripped forward to throw it—

--and it sounded dully against the wood of the floor. The sniper had already had two bullets in him – the strain of movement must have torn something, and the last reserve of power spilled out beneath him. The sniper slumped forward, concealing the blood, which did not spread out around him because it was draining through the cracks between the floorboards. The low, long, waves of breath now became a panting susurration, as all of his being was focused on his heart, the engine of life, beating frantically – only now it had nothing left to push.

Cloudy eyes rolled up at Seamus.

"Imperialist bastard." Seamus spat.

"_Gwyddelig llofruddion" _The sniper gasped.

Seamus fired until he'd spent the rest of the magazine.

* * *

Avise's car roared to a stop on the roadside on the edge of the wasteland moments later – Hilshire was already jumping out and sprinting towards the three cyborgs before it had even come to rest.

Agapita was woozy and her face a mask of crimson – her head wound had gouged a deep cut along her skull which was too large to clot quickly – but she hadn't been disabled and remained coherent enough to help Triela manhandle the limp form of Dona into the car. Its wheels scudded for a moment before it lurched away, hanging low on its suspension through the weight of three cyborgs in the back.

Rolling with the pendulous weight, the car skidded through the streets, bounding away from the climbing threat of closing sirens until it swung about and potted itself into an open garage. Two Section One agents were already waiting there; one blasted the car with a jetspray, the water-blade stripping off the car's outer paint layer and turning it from white to blue, while the other unscrewed and replaced its registration plates – both worked with the silent, smooth efficiency of a pit-stop crew.

Races are won by manoeuvre as much as they are by raw speed, however – the car which emerged from the garage didn't come out spilling smoke like a dragster, but carefully nosed its way to the roadside, waited for lights to turn green, and mirror-signal-manoeuvred at every junction. One would have thought that such care on Italian streets of all places would have stuck out, but the police's gratitude at seeing someone follow the rules for once evidently overrode their sense of suspicion. So, the car ambled amiably along the side-roads of the city until it arrived at a lot where two or three vans and several cars were already waiting. People crossed over or were carried from one to the other, and then the column snaked out onto the motorway, and the road to Rome.

* * *

A couple of days later, the media in Milan was still frothing in brouhaha over the death of the policewoman by senseless feral gangs. With that story on everyone's lips odd column inches where small advertisers had dropped out, and thirty-second slots in-between the big pieces, were instead filled with brief, cursory mentions of Costanzo Bienati, a fourteen year-old boy who had been found drowned in a canal. Autopsy revealed that Costanzo had a bellyful of whiskey, and it was decided that blunt-force trauma on the head was consistent with impact from a fall; the coroner ruled accidental death, and police were not treating the case as suspicious. The Lombardy Association For Safe Living provided a soundbite condemning self-serving vendors who irresponsibly sold alcohol to minors, and also criticised the spread of the foreign binge-drinking culture which equated machismo with inebriation – with tragic results – and which was rapidly corrupting the nation's youth.

* * *

(Continued)


	5. Chapter 5 Afterwards

Lorenzo saw as through a glass – darkly.

He stared at Dona, and Dona stared back – or rather, stared at the one-way mirror and straight _through _him.

The cyborg sat on the edge of a hospital trolley, dressed only in a thin paper gown. Her arms and cheeks were marked with sticking-plasters – depicting cartoon bears – where shot from Triela's blasts had peppered her, making her look just like an energetic young girl who'd danced into a bramble bush or who'd taken a tumble from a playground roundabout...

...but then, that was an appropriate analogy for all of the wrong reasons though, wasn't it?

Dona sat stock-still and immobile, as though she was in a rigour – but her eyes were not vacant and unfocused, but set into a piercing stare, firing a beam in front of her. Dona may have been catatonic, but Lorenzo was the one who felt stripped and hollow in this exchange.

The Chief shifted from one foot to another uncomfortably. He could have stepped out of the vector of Dona's steady, severe stare simply by shuffling to either side – but for some queer reason that was just as uncomfortable – as absurd as it was, a voice in the back of his mind quailed at the risk of him doing so... and then finding out that Dona's eyes were following him.

Lorenzo thankfully found a distraction to lift him out of his funk when the click of a door closing behind him signalled Bianchi's arrival in the observation room.

"Well, Doctor, what's the prognosis?"

"I don't want to say anything for certain," Bianchi ventured, "this is new territory that we're wandering into, after all. I know that it sounds like heresy for a man of science to say this, but it's somewhere where I've never wanted to explore."

"Be that as it may, Doctor, we've been caught and dumped in the wilds, and now we have to navigate our way out. What do you think you can do with Dona?"

"At present, Dona's not so much in a state of catatonia as withdrawal; you might call it 'voluntary autism', in a way." Bianchi twisted his lips into a grimace to indicate that he'd rather the layman didn't. "She will react to an external stimulus – hammer on the knee, that sort of thing – but despite that she will immediately revert to inaction. It's as though she doesn't _want _to respond any more than she needs to, or just has no interest in it."

"But she's conscious?" Lorenzo glanced back at that stare.

"Introverted, but yes, by all best metrics she's aware – that in itself is interesting." Bianchi also turned to look at Dona through the glass, although he could look at the young girl for longer than Lorenzo could bring himself to. "When Raballo had his – _accident – _"

"Are you insinuating something, Doctor Bianchi?" Lorenzo snapped harshly.

"Not at all, sir, I'm a plain-spoken man." Bianchi reassured his Chief.

Lorenzo grunted. "You're a godawful liar, Bianchi, but carry on."

"Very well, sir – when Raballo died, Claes collapsed into a vegetative state the moment she was informed. Given that, we may have expected Dona to have suffered complete and total mental shutdown, given that she wasn't only told second-hand of her handler's death but actually witnessed it directly. However, precisely the opposite proved to be the case. Dona was..." – Bianchi swallowed nervously – "..._excited _in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Theuma's death, and although she eventually slipped into a coma, she remained active for some time. She also seems to have begun the process of emergence from that comatic state unusually rapidly, too. "

"So, what does that mean? What makes Dona different from Claes? They're both first-generation models, they both have the same wiring."

"Duvalier would probably insist that he crafts bespoke artistic sculpture, not setting the dimensions of a production-line commodity" Bianchi responded, without humour. "As for reasons, at this stage I can only assume that it's situational, two different inputs into the same system.

"After that debacle when Pia happily and unquestioningly trotted off after Earnest, we made sure that the second-generation cyborgs have some _latitude _in their relationships, but we have to remember that there's an absolute, fundamental core command hard-wired into the first-generation conditioning – that they must obey their handlers absolutely and defend them with their lives."

"So with Claes, Raballo's death removed the engine to her train of thought. No handler to obey, no function to perform." Lorenzo inferred.

"Exactly. Dona has the same essential instruction, but in her case the _phrasing _of that instruction becomes important."

"This is all starting to sound very much like tenuous minutiae, Doctor. Are you trying to blind me with science?"

Bianchi furrowed his eyebrows in irritation, but he stopped short of speaking out of turn with a hostile remark to his superior. Instead, he spread his arms apologetically. "Forgive me, Chief, but I can only say what I think."

_You could at least try to say it with something like sincerity, _Lorenzo grumbled internally, not believing Bianchi for a moment. Bianchi was a vital part of the Section Two staff but even though he was subordinate to the Chief, something about the doctor irked Lorenzo immensely – his very presence seemed to prickle Lorenzo's hairs and rub him up the wrong way. Perhaps it was a tribal thing, in a way – in spying, you were caught in a web of subterfuge, deceit and misdirection, trapped in a tangle where every word was chosen and all expressions were concealed behind masks. Suspicion and mistrust drove every action, was half of his profession's very reason for _being_. In such a world, certainty in your own self was the only anchor to sanity, the only point of reference to keep your position in the mess – but as a shrink, Bianchi could make you question even that.

"Well, please elaborate" Lorenzo eventually decided.

"The nature of the conditioning means that the instruction is not so much a state as a specific, exhortative command – not 'I exist to protect my handler' but 'I _will _obey my handler, I _will_ protect him'. Dona did not pitch over the second that Theuma died precisely because she involved in his death – it became a conscious _failure _on her part, a _mistake_ that she had to _correct_. She couldn't, of course, but in her childish logic she thought if she just worked extra-hard in other areas then that would make up for falling down in others – hence the enthusiasm with which she went to work on the Padanians in the first contact, and her later movement and activity."

Bianchi turned to look at Dona, who still kept the same pose, and the expression that was not slack but set _hard_. Bianchi continued. "Eventually, though, an inescapable sense of futility wore her down – bad enough during your mid-life crisis, but imagine the despair it would inspire in a young child, particularly one who knows that she doesn't have much time to make her mark on the world – and put her into the inactive state that Agapita and Triela found her in."

Lorenzo glanced back through the mirror, shivering involuntarily. "But you said that Dona wasn't in a comatic state anymore, that she's begun to emerge from it. We had to shock Claes back to consciousness, so how did that come about?"

"That, I think, is something that we'll only know for sure when Dona herself deems fit to tell us." Bianchi shook his head sadly. "Perhaps she wants a 'best fit' – if she can't follow the prime order a hundred percent of the time, she can aspire to protecting another handler for as long as she can--"

"—So she's retrievable?" Lorenzo interrupted. Not the most emotionally sensitive mark to make, perhaps, but as Section Chief it was part of his burden to keep some attention to practical matters, and the sordid topic of coin.

"—or she despises the Agency for not making her strong enough to defend her beloved handler in the first place, and aims to take revenge on us all for our crimes of omission, when an opportunity emerges." Bianchi continued smoothly. "I'm afraid that it'll be some time before I could clear her for operations again, sir."

Lorenzo took that in his stride. After the experiences with Elsa and Pia, there was always a measure of doubt contaminating the remaining first-generation cyborgs – it was sad to lack full unfettered confidence in your own charges, but he was now resigned to it. Agapita had problems, but by and large it was ironic that the weaker conditioning of the second-generation cyborgs made them more reliable, by giving them a cushion of flexibility to absorb shocks – while the first-generations were tougher and could do more, Lorenzo sometimes had lurid visions of rampaging adolescents pulverising everything to atoms while screaming "DOES NOT COMPUTE!"

"Alright, then. How long until we can start the process, at least? What can you do to bring Dona back to full consciousness?"

Bianchi sucked in his breath through his teeth in hesitation. "We're still debating how to proceed. One option is provocation – take her response to stimuli, and make it continuous, harassing her until we can wear down the psychological armour and goad her into an outburst... but before I do that I want to review the terms of my life insurance policy."

The doctor and the director looked at each other – and then, for some wonderful reason, both of them laughed.

* * *

Draghi tapped a beat with his fingernail against the edge of the keyboard. Then he massaged his eyes. Then he minimised the window and spent time clearing old messages out of his E-Mail inbox (and marvelled at how the Nigerian royal family's cyberterrorism regiment was staffed by such elite hackers that they could penetrate military firewalls). Then he got up and refreshed his coffee. Then he fired off a message to Catering requesting a resupply of Carraro beans for the office galley. Then he rearranged his paper tidy so that the green pens were all in the appropriately colour-coded pot. Then he completed the disciplinary reports on Toni and Benito (acted to the best that the circumstances allowed, external complaints not deemed sufficient cause for punishment, offer compliments of Section One Chief for their diligence). Then he bulled his dress boots for the funeral tomorrow. Then he wrote his commentary and recommendations on the weekly routines from the Campania regional station. Then he picked burrs out of his dress uniform for the funeral tomorrow. Then he made another coffee. Then he drank it. Then he walked to the galley and cleaned his cup. Then he wrote his commentary and recommendations on the weekly routines from the Sicily regional station. Then he remembered how teeth-grindingly irritating the ear-cutting click of those little balls on the Newton's Crade at the corner of his desk were. Then he played with it anyway.

Then he had to finish the final paragraphs of his operational report.

"...At D3H1026 the Objective was sighted by the Jean-Rico fratello, stationed in the aerial observation unit. Section One command staff at position Zero immediately and expeditiously relayed this information to all search units and required those units in the near vicinity of the Objective location to retrieve her. Immediate response was provided by the Hilshire-Triela and Avise-Agapita fratelli.

Both fratelli split up after responding to the command staff – while the cyborgs proceeded to secure the Objective, the handlers diverted to secure transport placed by Section One (Vehicle-14) in accordance with Section One command plans, so as to assist with exfiltration.

Both cyborgs reached the Objective location at H1039, where they immediately engaged in combat with hostile forces attempting to abduct the Objective. These hostile forces were confirmed to be Padanian. Total deaths were six – five enemy agents, plus one civilian law enforcement agent who attempted to intervene in the action. No persons escaped from the action; although sound alerted the locality to the action, there were no known direct eyewitnesses. Both cyborgs sustained injuries during the action. The Objective also sustained injuries from friendly-fire from the cyborgs.

Following the engagement the Objective was successfully retrieved and both fratelli, after forming a rendezvous, began escape & evasion to remove themselves from the immediate threat area of interception by law enforcement. They followed a route assigned to them by Section One command staff with checkpoints protected by Section One agents and were successfully extracted from the danger zone. With the Objective secured official withdrawal and exfiltration began with Section One agents forming a motor convoy on the public road network. Search parties still in Milan were immediately recalled. In accordance with operational needs priority was given to the protection of the Objective so search parties were required to return to headquarters individually.

The Objective was delivered to headquarters D3H1756. Operation Painter-2 was formally concluded at D4H0036 when the last remaining search party and field unit, the Section Two Marco-Piera fratello, reported in at headquarters.

In brief estimation I would judge Operation Painter-2 to be a success. The Objective was retrieved, and a significant number of Padanian militants were terminated. The loss of civilian life, while regrettable, would have been inevitable given the instability inherent to Section Two cyborgs, and the fact that it was limited to a relatively small number of three deaths, while the Objective was still extracted without breaking cover, is a testament to field operatives' professionalism and the quality and responsiveness of command staff planning, combined with their attentive supervision.

This concludes my introductory narrative synopsis of Operation Painter-2. Detailed evaluation and assessment and reports of individual actions will follow in the attached documents.

Adriano Draghi

Section One (Public Security), Chief of Section

Operation Painter-2 Field Commander"

* * *

Avise and Hilshire nodded greetings to each other at a corridor junction in the Agency hospital.

"How's Triela bearing up? She's been in my prayers." Avise began as the two walked together towards the exit.

"Fine, very well even – the bullet didn't penetrate the fibre layer, and Donato just had to paste in a new slice; the nicks on her legs only needed a skin-spray. She'll be back in her dorm tonight." Hilshire had mixed feelings about that – he was acutely aware that at Triela's late stage of development her life was measured out not in years but in hospital treatments, so to only need a minor one was a true relief, but there was the nag of something else, too. There had been so much blood in the back of the car that last day in Milan, and he had been genuinely happy when he thought that all of it was pumping out of Agapita; when he discovered that Triela had suffered harm too, he had despised Agapita, as if she had deceived him. Mimi had been trouble, as well...

Hilshire guiltily hid the unworthy memories in the back of his mind and instead returned Avise's courtesy. "What about Agapita, how long until she's back on her feet?"

"She'll be totally out of action for days yet. Her skullcase is completely cracked on the left side and the quack says that the whole thing will need replacing." Avise sounded more annoyed than upset. "It's bad that she has to stay shackled to the bed. One of the advantages of the cyborgs is that they're not laid out for months – it's only a quick turnaround before they're off and raring to go again – but sawbones says that a sensitive area needs time to bed in... then there's going to be a conditioning review, but at least I don't have to worry about that until later. And Agapita's pretty morose herself..."

"That's understandable," Hilshire offered, if only to break up Avise's long litany of tragedy, "even if they can take it, I doubt cyborgs find getting shot _fun_."

"Well, there _is_ that, but she's actually quite chirpy about the injury - relishing having a legitimate reason to dodge my P.T. sessions for a few days, in fact." Avise's shoulders shuddered in a subdued chuckle. "No, she's actually upset because she feels as though she disappointed _Triela_."

Hilshire stopped. "Is that right?"

Avise nodded. "Sincerely. Agapita's well aware that Triela's more than a little _distant_ towards her – she doesn't know why, of course – and she was hoping that an opportunity to fight together would break the ice, so to speak. Instead, she slipped up on the ice – she's really worried that Triela will start to hate her for it."

Hilshire twisted his mouth into a grimace, and began walking again. "Well, I'll talk to Triela. I sympathise—I can understand her reluctance, but the deed's already been done." Hilshire turned his head away. "It's not as though anything can be done about a cyborg now."

The two handlers exited the front of the hospital – the very instant they crossed the threshold there was the dim crack of striking flint as Avise lit up a cigarette – and they began to circle around the driveway garden to the bridge leading back to the Agency compound. There used to be several trees planted there – an aspiration to rich and fulfilled life – but everyone agreed that the bare, flensed skeletons of branches in winter didn't exactly propagate the most enthusiastic go-get-'em attitudes, and they'd recently been cut down and replaced with a clump of evergreen shrubs.

"Small but perfectly formed." Avise laughed happily. Seeing Hilshire's perplexed expression, he traced a circle in the air with the glowing red mark of his cigarette by way of gesture, and explained. "Oh, just all the spirit God puts in the world for you to notice."

Hilshire looked back at the garden, and saw plants. Lively Italians – years amongst them and their ability to take anything from everything still left him baffled.

"Thank Him for helping Agapita too." Avise followed Hilshire's backward gaze and continued past it to the hospital. "The second-generation armour isn't up to much, but still – if she only had ordinary bone her brain would have been evacuated over the grass. She's been blessed."

Hilshire blinked. "You really think that?" Hilshire sounded more surprised than contemptuous, but there was definitely an incredulous note in his voice.

Sensing the question in Hilshire's speech, Avise came to a stop and lowered his cigarette. "Yeah, actually, I do." His eyes flashed with a challenge. "You don't?"

Hilshire sucked in a breath through his teeth. _Touchy_. "It just seems to me that if God really was there protecting you, He'd stop you from getting hurt at all, rather than just letting you get slapped with half of it. It's like thanking the gaoler because he's can't bother himself to whip you as much today."

"Maybe," Avise's eyes were hostile, "but we of all people are the ones who probably warrant a few strokes, don't you say?"

Hilshire didn't look at Avise directly, but glanced out of the corner of his eye towards the hospital, which had turned its imperturbable face towards the two handlers. "And _Mimi_? What did she do to deserve getting her legs blown off? Or half her head ripped away now?"

Avise sucked in another breath from his cigarette before replying. "Don't insult me, Hilshire. I _did _read _my own cyborg's_ file, although I wonder if you ever have. Mimi quietened down in her last couple of years – Mary bless her for opening her heart to goodness – but she was quite the vicious little rat when she was younger. You should see her juvenile rap sheet – the only reason it doesn't roll down to the floor when you open it is because you can't be criminally culpable until you're ten. The apple didn't fall far from Bossi's tree."

Hilshire's eyes opened wide; and his normally unflappable Teutonic bearing felt something like anger stir behind it. "How can you say that?" He choked. "That's grotesque! It's not only _offensive _to a _friend_ but – your own cyborg! – how can you _violate _her like that?"

Avise exhaled slowly, smoke streaming from the far corners of his mouth. "Step. _Back. _Hilshire."

Suddenly feeling very exposed and unfamiliar, Hilshire did so. This time, Avise didn't prepare his thoughts with a puff of smoke, but spoke directly.

"I _love_ Agapita, Hilshire. I don't command her, and I don't feel some sense of _guilty obligation_ to her – I _love _her. I love her with _all my heart_." Hilshire blinked in surprise when he noticed that Avise's hand was quivering from the intensity of his emotion, even crushing his cigarette between his fingers. Avise continued. "And I love her for _who she is_, purely and exactly, and _not_ the _fantasy _of what I'd like her to become."

Avise noticed that he'd destroyed his cigarette, and as he continued to speak he automatically pressed the remains into a small lozenge-tin ash-tray fished from a pocket. "Hilshire, at the end of the day, we're spies. We live amongst secrets, trade in secrets, fight _with_ secrets. How do we manage it, though? Lying's not a habit for either of us. You were a cop, having to give testimonies on oath; I was a soldier, and my only business was making people fall over and not get back up again. Pretty straightforward, really."

"For you, maybe." Hilshire said, not a little bit haughtily.

"Keep telling yourself that, Hilshire, it just proves my point." Avise smiled humourlessly. "We can do this because it's _natural_. We keep secrets from friends; from families; from each other; from _ourselves_. That little black stain of dishonesty; the wretched spot that hasn't washed out since Eden.

"Love is a way of looking past all the lies that we wrap ourselves in against the world, and not being repulsed by what we find. It's a way of shedding those thick protections because, for once, we don't _need _them. I've seen Agapita naked – I don't mean her being in her starkers when she first woke up in the recovery room, but her entire life was laid out in front of me. School reports, medical records, arrest warrants – good grief, Section One even pulled out and stuck back together torn-up receipts for soccer shirts out of her wastepaper basket. I saw every sin, and every smile as well – and I wanted to be a part of it, Hilshire. I traced my fingers over a facsimile of a life in dry paper and I wanted the sensation of warmth in flesh. I wanted it _desperately_.

"So it is for us for us humans. What about the man upstairs, then? It's sad that we keep secrets, really. It's a mark of our ignorance, our inadequacy – because it's futile. You can't hide them, because there's one man who knows all the dirty things you sweep into the cesspit – and also knows everything that we truly deserve for polluting the world with them. Not being able to admit that – not being able to admit it even when we _know _it – is the most hopeless secret of them all. Until we can, we'll be closed to love, and we'll always suffer."

"Well rehearsed." Hilshire frowned.

"Remember that old saying, 'the military is nine parts boredom to one part terror'? You can't spend the _entire _nine parts smoking and discussing the merits of left-handed masturbation." Avise fished for a fresh cigarette.

Hilshire thought for a moment.

"...I don't think that I like you right this minute, Avise Mancini." He announced.

Avise stopped trying to light his cigarette, put it away, and looked at Hilshire carefully.

There was plenty of noise from the rumble of cars beneath the bridge, but a solid silence passed between the handlers.

"That's unfortunate."

Hilshire grunted, waving his arms in a gesture, as though he was trying to scoop his thoughts back from where they'd spread out in front of him and put them back in order. "All this makes you seem... _lessened_, Avise. There's something mean and perverse in saying that it's our own entire fault, and if we don't understand why that's our fault, too. Love? _Tough_ love. Very much so." He remarked ruefully, before fixing the other man with his eye. "And what about 'Saint' Mancini, while everyone else is lamenting over their hidden evils?"

Then something happened which Hilshire did not expect. The impermeable glassy armour laid over Avise's eyes suddenly dropped away. The two wide pupils which stared at him now were open, wavering, exposed, vulnerable – and deeply, achingly, unreachably sad.

"_Especially_ me."

* * *

Mario didn't have any family, so his funeral was held in the monastery chapel. The Mass was conducted by an Army padre who Avise knew and trusted to be discreet outside the Agency, and although Olga would have preferred to have lent her voice to an operatic aria the rafters sang with her as she led the choir. The whole of Section Two (except for Dona, who was still under observation) attended: Agapita's head was still swathed in bandages and held up by a neck-brace, but she wouldn't be deterred from helping to send off a fellow soul going before her; even Marisa showed her face, although she was the first out the door as soon as the coffin had been borne away. A sizeable proportion of Section One also offered their own respects, unifying both groups (and sometimes factions) in gathered solemnity with the one being who crossed every border.

Once it was done, the final committals made and Mario's corporeal remains given up into the Earth (his will had left specific instructions that he wasn't to be cremated – it was a practise that was "too northern", apparently), the cyborgs were sent back to their rooms and the adults all congregated in the refectory for an informal but subdued meal – not a rowdy wake – to remember their colleague amongst themselves as well as to God.

Even though he was the Section Chief, Lauro felt out of place. Virtually all of the handlers and agents were in the dress uniforms of their former units and organisations and forces. Avise's Bersaglieri hat had so many feathers it looked as though it'd leap up into the air and fly about the room; Jose looked fidgety and uncomfortable in his Carabinieri uniform, as though he felt that his present work had soiled the guise of a lawman; and Lorenzo wasn't surprised to see that Priscilla still seemed quite fetching, even despite her severe Finance Guard dress. As it was, though, it left just Alessandro, a couple of others scattered at far ends of the table, and Lorenzo himself in ordinary civilian morning dress. As soon as it was appropriate, he excused himself from the table, and as he walked he found his footsteps taking him back to the monastery, and down into the mausoleum.

These sorts of places always seemed bleak. A grave let a man leave at least some mark on the world, but it was hard enough to get a child to attend to a grandparent's grave - even the most lovingly-tended monument would crumble before the soul that it directed prayers to could escape Purgatory. The Coliseum had stood in Rome – more or less – for two millennia, but would it be there for four? Six? Twelve? Did the Emperors care?

Well, they probably did, but then they hardly had a say in the matter now.

The memorial wall was softly lit by understated recessed lighting, tinting the wall with a downy orange glow that could be suggestive of a fresh dawn of new beginnings, or a gentle and relaxing sunset into a good, peaceful night.

Most of the tiles in the wall were still blank, beds for this comfortable sentiment – but towards the bottom, names started to appear. The letters chiselled through the straight reflections, leaving recesses into which shadows could accumulate.

Lorenzo squatted down to find Mario Theuma's plate, which had already been installed before the funeral. Lorenzo reached out and brushed his hand over it, tracing the letters with his fingers and wondering if he could rub out the darker shades as they travelled.

KYRIE ELEISON

MARIO THEUMA

MCMLXVI-MMVI

Somehow the quiet thing seemed so far removed from a rubbery-feeling body that was laid out – and open – on a mortuary table.

And then again, further down:

DOMINE EXAUDE VOCEM MEAM

LAURO MORETTI

MCMLXXI-MMV

Did it show blood set into rubies in the frost of a winter morning? Things that gleamed, but ran and stained with a touch?

Further along:

AVE MARIA GRATIA PLENA

IRMA ESPOSITO

MCMLXXVIII-MMV

Would it inspire a sensation of a knife in her heart – and shrapnel in her womb?

Lorenzo glanced up, and his eyes were led higher, to one more.

AGNUS DEI

ANGELICA

MM-MMV

...What about that? A thin, fading whisper of songs of princes and pasta, ringing off of the silent tears of grown men, lending a voice where they could not speak? Could he bring that to mind?

Lorenzo blinked, and realised that he just had.

* * *

**THE END**


End file.
